


Still Wait For You

by afogocado



Series: Sir Obi and You [1]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Angst, Daddy Kink, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Female Masturbation, Fluff, Forbidden Love, Friends to Lovers, Humor, Jealousy, Male Masturbation, Mentions of Blood, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Oral Sex Male Receiving, PIV Sex, Reader has a sexual awakening in Chapter 4, Sneaking Around, Soulmates, Stolen Moments, Unwanted Advances, Violence, Virgin!Obi-Wan, Virgin-Reader, emotional fingerbanging in chapter 5, oral sex female receiving
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:08:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 51,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24582832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afogocado/pseuds/afogocado
Summary: Sir Obi-Wan Kenobi has been assigned as your knight since you were eleven years old. Whispers of an impending war waver throughout your kingdom. Marriage laws become the norm in order to establish peace between nations. By this point, you are fifteen years into Sir Kenobi’s fierce loyalty and protection. It isn’t until your father breaks the devastating news that you are to be betrothed to Naboo’s sovereign leader, Sheev Palpatine. When your father’s attempts to ratify the marriage proposal are wholly futile, he manages to press one condition into the clause: that Sir Kenobi remain assigned to you, and never leave your side. Sheev Palpatine is furious.Sir Kenobi is bound to your soul—he would follow you to the ends of the earth, and wait for you until his dying breath.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Reader, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Reader, Obi-Wan Kenobi/You, Sheev Palpatine/Reader
Series: Sir Obi and You [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1846198
Comments: 143
Kudos: 460





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obi-Wan is 10 years older than Reader when he is first assigned as her knight. The beginning of this story shows how their relationship develops over time. Nothing gross or whatever happens when she is young. This is an effort to show a sort of Padawan/Master relationship in a Medieval!AU. Obi-Wan doesn't groom reader or anything like that. He leaves when she is young, and then comes back into her life when she reaches adulthood.

‘Ah, love, let us be true  
To one another! for the world, which seems  
To lie before us like a land of dreams,  
So various, so beautiful, so new,  
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,  
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;  
And we are here as on a darkling plain  
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,  
Where ignorant armies clash by night.’  
  
-Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’  
  
—

  
1  
(15 years earlier)

  
“I _know_ that Lord Organa’s precious young one was _not_ out of bed and _sneaking around_ at the beach again…Well past her bedtime.” The stern, but kind voice echoes through the antechamber leading into your rooms and your palm stiffens flat against your bedroom door.  
  
“Sir Kenobi,” you turn towards the sound of his pitying sigh and feel your cheeks flush with a cruel embarrassment only known by eleven year old girls when a handsome older boy looks down upon them with kindness.   
  
But this is not just any older boy.

This is Sir Obi-Wan Kenobi, twenty-one, and newly knighted, with his short buzz cut to prove it. All of the new knights in the Coruscant kingdom were shaved of their hair upon initiation into the brotherhood. It felt like you’ve spent ages watching it grow back, now more bristly and a beautiful sandy color. His cerulean? aquamarine? eyes are shining and bright in the dark alcove and he steps from the shadows to frown down at you with his hands on his hips. You learned all too quickly that Sir Kenobi, though not old _old_ , like your father and the other knights you’ve become acquainted with during the past several months of Sir Kenobi’s appointment, he was still _old_ in a way. That way was the way of schoolteachers: a constant slew of shifting exasperated sighs and groans; a head and drive filled with rigid rules and _codes_ and _principles_ ; a mouth constantly lecturing outside of study hours.

But he was still very young. His face always shone with a constant bright hopefulness that seemed to linger long after his early adolescence ended. His face smooth, his cheeks and jaw not quite chiseled into manhood yet, and still seemingly unable to grow facial hair like your father could. One of his lingering adolescent attributes that still clung with a vindictive ferocity that you delighted in, and he was frustrated with were the bouts of acne that would crop up on his nose, his forehead, his cheeks sometimes. You relished any opportunity to point them out to him, and then watch him turn the other way and pick at it until his face is breathing and you are cackling, and he is glaring.

But, tonight, he’s caught you out of bed again. This has been an ongoing issue ever since the weather has turned nice again and you’ve taken your nighttime premature-insomnia strolls outside, making it all the way to the beach that was seemingly in your back yard. It’s really hard to look at him when you know you’re going to get a lecture; the ones in the evenings are the worst because he is _grouchy_ and _grumpy._

He’s without his armor tonight, instead in his beige tunic that stops above his elbows and below his waist, thinner white sleeves underneath. The lace around his chest isn’t even tied and the tassels hang loose and open—he must have been readying for bed before going to check on you one last time and finding you gone. You flush when you see that he is also without his greaves and instead simple trousers, his boots untied.  
  
“Well?”  
  
“I was visiting the ghost crabs,” you say pointing your chin up at him in defiance as though this reasoning was infallible and as though only a fool would reprimand a girl for going to visit her sandy beach friends.  
  
He rolls his eyes. “If your father knew you were out of bed you would be in trouble. Not only that but what if you got too close to the tide in the dark and it swept you away?”  
  
You roll your eyes back at him. Ever since your father declared you ready to bare children (whatever _that_ mean), he bemoaned the fact that you were to be protected at almost all times. ‘The family bloodline must remain protected,’ he said stiffly as though that were the end of the conversation. You were more concerned with finding a way to protect your bedding from the line of blood that crept from you while you slept. Words of chastity purity virginity. All things needing protection. So, in came Sir Kenobi.  
  
“I don’t know how I would be able to explain to your father that you risk your life—almost nightly! —for those blasted creatures.”  
  
“They’re cute.”  
  
He scoffs, and his hand goes into his hair, brushing it back and forth with his palm. “Cute. Yes well, I believe you’ve had enough cuteness for one evening.” He moves towards you and places his hand on your shoulder, steering you into your chambers. “Now get changed and please go to sleep.”  
  
He stands at the threshold that straddles the space between your room and the antechamber, arms crossed against his chest in what he’s trying to show as sternness but falling short. You move to your old, wooden trunk filled with clothes, and dig out your sleepwear before giving him a final look.  
  
“Sir Obi?”  
  
He’s never chastised you for calling him that, even when everyone else called him Sir Kenobi. If anything, he goes a little easier on you when you call him that. He becomes more indulgent when it comes to your nuances that others find strange, but he finds endearing.

He arches his eyebrow at you upon hearing his nickname. “Yes?”  
  
“You’re so pretty.” And though he makes you feel embarrassed sometimes, with his perfect smile, and the way he showers you with attention when you feel so ignored and alone by literally everyone else in the castle, there is still an innocent bravery in you that tells the truth. Because you’re young, and you don’t know any better about hiding feelings that are true. “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you.” You say this earnestly, almost matter-of-factly, further bundling your bed clothes into your arms so they aren’t touching the floor. “And _then,_ you’ll never be able to tell me what to do again because I’ll be the one in charge of our marriage bond.”  
  
His face breaks into a bright grin, and he laughs. He leans into your doorway to support his frame that literally quakes with his laughter. And there’s that brilliant smile that shows almost all of his teeth that makes you feel dizzy, and don’t know why. “Is that so?”  
  
“Yes.” You give him a perturbed look—is that not what you just said? Maybe _he_ needs a lecture about listening. You try not to roll your eyes.  
  
“I see,” he laughs off your girlish affections and goes to close your door.  
  
“And we shall have a house full of ghost crabs.” You finish, pointedly, hugging your bed clothes to your chest. Your eyebrow is arched in the same sassy way his do. Your father has noticed, and he does not approve Sir Kenobi’s demure sassiness rubbing off on you.  
  
“Then I should like to ratify the marriage. Good night, young one. And GO TO SLEEP.” He gives you one last amused smile before letting your door shut softly.

2

  
  
You won’t feel bad about terrorizing Sir Kenobi in his new knighthood until you’re older. But in your preteen years, you give him a run for his money. You also challenge him in ways that he never was told about in the brotherhood, which he took upon himself to lecture you about CONSTANTLY. His lecturing mostly fell on deaf ears, unless your father was around. On the afternoons that you were particularly in need of your father’s attention, you would precariously stalk behind him, stepping on his shadows while he dictated eloquent letters for the castle’s harried scribe to write out and send to other kingdoms. Sir Kenobi would silently burst into the political chambers of the castle and all but drag you out by the ear, your arms pinwheeling in silent protest.  
  
Other times, Sir Kenobi would perch himself in an armchair in your study chambers with your private professor who would blather on about historical events you couldn’t quite follow, pretending to take notes, and doodling ghost crabs. Your favorite was Penelope—one that you’re sure, for years, has poked out of the sand to greet your return to the beach every night. When your gaze pulls from your parchment (or from one of the many exposed brick windows that had a clear viewing of the ocean), you would meet Sir Kenobi’s eyes across the room and he would reprimand you with his trademark silent death stare until you behaved and pretended to listen to your instructor a bit better.  
  
Other times—still—Sir Kenobi would be in deep meditation, legs crossed on the hard stone floor near the kitchens while you had baking lessons with the older girls who lived in the castle and oversaw the culinary activities. Sir Kenobi made it clear over and over again, in his HOURLY lectures, that you were NOT to disturb him while he was meditating. That meditating was one of the most important codes to his knighthood. It was meant to keep his mind and nerves and emotions as keen and in shape as his physical training (that you would watch from your bedroom window, envious of the way he so skillfully wielded his sword and twirled the heavy weapon with a flick of the wrist it seemed). Meditating was the one code you found the most _boring_ , and believed with your whole heart and entire fiber of your being that he took it _far_ too seriously. The level of concentration in his face while doing it almost always looked pained—lines would crease into his forehead and would set deeper where his eyes would crinkle sometimes when he laughed at you. On this particular meditation day, you would show him that it’s sometimes just as good to take a break and let loose, as you plop down in front of him, legs crossed like his, knees almost touching, and tugging at his loose trousers with one hand. He peeks one eye open, smile ghosting his lips.

“It looks like _someone_ would love to write me fifty more lines of the Knight’s Code.”

“I made this for you,” you say, placing the small almond cake on the side of his knee.

He smiles softly at this and thanks you. You stare at him. He stares back. “What.”

“Are you going to try it?”

“Right now?” He looks down at the dessert on his knee, then back at you.

“Yes, right now. I just made it special for you?” You literally just told him; did he not listen?

He rolls his eyes. You roll yours back at him.

He plucks the cake from his knee, brushing the lingering crumbs off with the back of his hand. He looks at the dessert, flicks his eyes at you. You lean forward and stare, your eyes telling him to take a bite already. He takes a small bite and hums out approval, chewing thoughtfully. Then, he slowly stops chewing, and his eyes go wide, and he drops the cake, and his hand flies up to his throat, and he starts sputtering, falling backwards dramatically, forearm splayed across his forehead in his theatrical fake death. He peeks at you from his eye again, “You’ve killed your knight. _How_ will you ever move on?”

You pick the cake up and throw it at his chest when he’s pushing himself to a sitting position again and he frowns at you.

“Hey! I was going to finish that.”

  
  


  
3

You are twelve when you begin practicing swears in the hand mirror you nicked from one of the older girls’ bedrooms.  
  
“Fuck!” You yell and then burst out into a mad laughter, your reflection silently chortling with you or at you.  
  
“Shit!”  
  
“GODDAMIT!”  
  
“ _FUCKING SHITTTTTTTTT_!”  
  
Your bedroom door flies open and bangs against the wall.  
  
“WHAT _-are-_ you doing?!” Sir Kenobi is aghast and an entire different level of weary you’ve never elicited from him before. It’s amazing, because his hair has grown out more and its long enough for him to stick his hands in it and push it back in frustration. Which is a lot. He closes the door behind him.  
  
“Nothing!” You spin around to face him, the hand mirror clumsily concealed behind your back.  
  
“Like hell nothing, I heard you all the way down the hall!” His thumb points behind him, towards the door. He moves over closer to you, towering above you, one hand on his hip, and his free one palm up. If he had fringe, his eyebrows would have disappeared beneath it in this non-verbal command to relinquish your ill-gotten treasure.  
  
You huff and slap the hand mirror into his palm.

His fingers curl around the handle and he points it at you. “I don’t want to catch you stealing again. Okay?”  
  
“You didn’t catch me stealing.” You point out, and his eyes are bulging and his hands are fretting in his amber locks.  
  
“I never want to see you in possession of something that doesn’t belong to you.” But it all comes out in one word and it upsets you to think that he’s actually a bit angry over this. “Okay?”  
  
You mumble something that vaguely sounds like ‘okay’.  
  
“I mean it.” He pokes you in the arm with the mirror. “Promise?”  
  
“I promise.”  
  
“Good. Now go to sleep.”  
  
“The sun is still up!”  
  
“Go to sleep, for the love that is all holy and good on this earth. And do not let me catch you sneaking in or out of this room.”  
  
“You never let me do anything!”  
  
“Oh, I let you do plenty, young one.”

You open your mouth to protest, to tell him that just the other night at dinner, you were telling your father that Sir Kenobi _never_ lets you do _anything._ And that, to your great annoyance and indignation, your father pointed his fork in your direction and said, “Exactly,” thus ending the conversation. Much like Sir Kenobi’s eyes are at this moment—you’re sure his eye lids are completely nonexistent at this point, and it takes everything in you to not die of laughter on the spot. That can wait until he leaves your room.

4

  
You are twelve AND A HALF when Sir Kenobi believes you’re ready for him to start teaching you about RESPONSIBILITY.

“I’m trusting you to look after this while I’m away.” He says, hands enclosed over something, and holding them out to you, but not opening them up for you to see what he has.

“Away?” You repeat and blink up at him.

“Yes, I’m afraid I must leave you for a little while. Your father is sending me away on a mission, and he’d prefer I go and…negotiate. Help keep the other knights in check. You understand, don’t you?”

It’s hard for you to nod your assent, but you do.

“There’s a girl,” he says, encouraging you to be brave. You can tell he doesn’t want to leave, too. He sighs and opens his palms to show you the small ghost crab in his gentle hold. “I’m afraid this isn’t Penelope, but I’m sure you’ll love it just the same.”

You screech out your delight and he hands the crab over. “What’s its name?”

He looks taken aback, like he didn’t think this far ahead. “Fre..derick?”

“Great.”

“Yes. Well, Frederick is your responsibility. You’ll care for him while I’m away. But this means that you must not sneak out of the castle and roam the beach. I need you to promise me that. Because I will not be here to look after you. And I would never forgive myself if something happened to you out there while I was away. Because I have not been nearly as hard on you as I should be when I’ve discovered you’ve left.”

You nod a bit, blushing with embarrassment. “I know.”

“Ah, says the girl who believes her mean old grumpy knight never lets her do anything.”

You roll your eyes at him. He rolls his back.

This comes not shortly after another bout of eavesdropping on the older girls who work in the kitchen downstairs. They all share quarters near the kitchen and when you breeze through it, you press your ear against the front door that leads to their rooms. They always talk about things you don’t understand, but it’s always very exciting to listen because the way they shriek over their stories are like secrets. And you’ve always wanted to be part of a secret.

But what you hear this evening is what you would later call disconcerting when such a term enters into your lexicon. At this moment, at this age, you’re not sure _what_ to call the tight coils in your chest and in your stomach when you hear the older girls giggle about how _handsome_ Sir Kenobi is, and how _glad_ they were that he’s _finally_ letting his hair grow out.

One of them sighs—perhaps a little too loudly—and you roll your eyes, but listen to her. “What I wouldn’t give to spend a night with him.”  
  
And you wrinkle your nose at the thought. Spending evenings with Sir Kenobi were _quite_ dull—he would lecture you about your studies; lecture you to get to bed on time; and lecture you about just how _inappropriate_ it is to request a knight of the Jedi Brotherhood to teach you how to spar with his _very dangerous_ sword.  
  
“I would too,” one of the other girls says. Emphatically, and you narrow your eyes, as if squinting your vision will allow you to hear better. “But it’s such a shame about his... You know. _Defect_.”  
  
This wholly intrigues you—each syllable of the word has captured your attention in a way that your lessons never would. A _defect_? Sir Kenobi? The perfect knight? A man without flaw? You press your ear into the door as the girl goes on to explain that he is a “you-nick”, whatever _that_ means.  
  
“It’s why he never bathes with the other knights,” she continues. “He’s so ashamed.”  
  
“Poor thing.” A new voice coos, and you don’t like that _at all_.

It’s very strange that they’re speaking about him this way—did they not understand that he was yours? Your knight?  
  
“Could you imagine what it looked like when he still had it?”  
  
Your head jerks back in utter confusion, having no idea what that meant, but you didn’t have long to ponder what she could have meant because there is a familiar throat-clearing sound from behind you, and you don’t even need to whirl around to know that it’s Sir Kenobi as he’s tugging the sleeve of your sleep clothes and dragging you after him.

Once he’s got you out of the kitchens and further into the direction of _your_ quarters, his lecturing starts, “It is _so_ late. What have I told you about—”

“What’s a you-nick?” You blurt out, a little bit too loudly, and it echoes down the empty corridor.

His head whips around in every direction possible, lets go of your sleeve, and looks down at you, face imploring, and eyebrows concerned. “ _What_?”

“The girls, that’s what they said you are?”

He sighs, and his eyes look thoughtful as his hand goes to cover his mouth, and his other fingers stroke at one of his eyebrows. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“You always say that,” you almost groan as he nudges you to start walking again. “Promise?”

“I promise. I promise.” And the way he says it, you believe him. And the way he’s thoughtful and no longer stern, you feel like it’s a dirty word. Like your swears. Something that shouldn’t be said. A secret.

When he doesn’t stop walking once you reach the antechamber that leads to your room, and he follows you in, you know he’s come in to _tuck_ you in to make sure that you don’t get out again. He’s sitting at the armchair he keeps next to your bed on the nights that you’re ill and he stays up with you; or when you’re afraid of a storm and he stays up with you; or you’re being an absolute nightmare and he stays up with you to make sure you actually go sleep and don’t sneak out.  
  
You’ve been settled into your pillows for a while, clutching at all of the blankets he’s piled on top of you and you feel yourself growing drowsy. He watches you thoughtfully from where he’s perched in his armchair with his legs crossed, gauging how you’re going to behave.

You yawn, and don’t fight sleep working to take you over. “You’re mine…aren’t you, Obi? My knight, and not for those other girls, right?”

When he sees that you are truly going to sleep and not cause any more trouble, he gives a small half smile and stands. He presses his palm to your forehead and brushes your fringe away. “Yes, my dear. I’m yours. I will always be your knight.” Before he leaves you for the night, he mutters, “Behave. You don’t want to disappoint Frederick. I daresay, he’s not as forgiving as I am.”  
  
  


  
5

  
You are sixteen when Sir Kenobi tells you that he must leave for a short crusade. And by short he meant a year or two. Maybe three. But no more than four. You’re taken aback by this news and want to tell him no. That he’s not allowed to go. Because you said so. Because you’re in charge. Because he’s YOURS. Because he’s your knight. And because he promised you the last time he left, he wouldn’t be leaving again. He promises you this time it is all diplomatic travel. No fighting.  
  
“I don’t believe you.”  
  
“I knew you wouldn’t,” he sighs, and actually looks like he feels bad about it.  
  
“Will you be able to write?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“And _will_ you write?” You squint your eyes at him doubtfully. “At least a few times a month?” This was being generous and he knew what you meant by this: he best write at least once a week, if not more.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Instructions for while he’s away: please behave and please listen to your teacher. Please be nice to your father. Please be nice to Knight Windu. Please don’t disappoint Frederick. Don’t go to the beach at night.  
  
Before he leaves, when you’re saying goodbye. A gift: a nondescript looking necklace on a silver chain and the pendant is a smooth piece of lapis lazuli—the color of his eyes sometimes when caught in a certain light.

“I’m trusting you to take care of this while I’m away,” he murmurs from behind you as he clasps it around your neck, careful to make sure your hair doesn’t get caught or snagged.

“It’ll be the first thing I show you when you return.”

He nods and smiles down at you, and in a moment of that honest affection you still so brazenly get from time to time (but not as open as when you were just a few years younger), you spring to the tips of your toes, and throw your arms around his neck and tell him goodbye. His arms catch around your waist: loose, a ghost of a grasp.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we examine Reader and our dear Sir Kenobi’s relationship while he’s away.

\--

  
1  
  


The morning that Sir Kenobi is set out to leave with the rest of his knights in his company is difficult, and you’re being a brat, and are isolating yourself in your rooms. The beautiful daybreak and fresh air creeping into your window is almost mocking you and you don’t feel like ever going outside again. Ever. You’re sitting at the foot of your bed, scowling at the window, and watching Frederick wrestle with the clam you’d given him. He’s digging at the meat inside for his breakfast. He blinks his obsidian eyes up at you and goes back to eating, staring in the direction of your door. There’s a light tapping, in a pattern: one of the secret knocks you’d established with Sir Kenobi a long time ago: the delicate pattern asks, ‘Is it okay to come in?’, and you shout out your consent.

Sir Kenobi presses your door open and you just stare at him. Frederick stops eating, still holding the clam shell.  
  
“I wanted to come say goodbye. Since, you know, you probably weren’t going to?” He’s only half teasing, but also half smiling, and your stomach drops fully out of your body. You drag yourself to your feet and step in front of him, looking up into his eyes where concern is etched around them.   
  
“Do you really think it’s going to be an entire three years?”  
  
“I will be gone as long as I must be, unfortunately.” He plucks a long hair off the sleeve of your dress and drops it away.  
  
“Will you be safe?” You watch it float to the ground and disappear before turning your attentions back to his face. Still smooth and youthful as ever, but matured with a sense of foreboding and a level of weariness that grows each day you see him.   
  
“I will be safe.” He finally concedes, but there’s a thickness to the air, and he looks away when he tells you that.   
  
You look at him doubtfully when his eyes find yours again.   
  
He raises his eyebrow at you. “What is it?”  
  
“What if you get…” _killed?_ “…hurt?”  
  
“Ah, you weren’t so worried about that the last time I left.”  
  
Because. Because…because, last time he left, you still looked up to him with childlike wonder, he was your hero, and he was literally invincible. This time around, you’re more aware about the whispers and rumbling of war and other battles, and of stories told by the older girls and knights who pass through that sometimes men don’t return home from their travels. Before—in your eyes—that just wasn’t a potential outcome for Sir Kenobi’s travels and duties abroad. But this time…

“I promise you, it is for negotiations only. And I will write all the time.” He tells you that he won’t be able to write until he’s settled at his first assignment’s location, and that he will alert you every time he’s set to leave, and then when he arrives at the next location so you know where to send your letters. “But I think you knew all of this.”

You mumble something about how he’s already lectured you about all of this the night before, when he had dinner with you and your father. You hadn’t eaten much because of your nerves, and Sir Kenobi had lightly kicked you under the table with the toe of his boot; when you looked up at him, his eyes were wide and imploring, then gesturing towards your vegetables.

“I actually wanted to talk to you about something more…delicate.”

Your heart races. What?

“Sit down,” he gestures towards the foot of your bed and Frederick runs to your pillows when you both go to sit and watches intently, his legs stretched out. Sir Kenobi sits near you once you’re settled. This makes you nervous. This is how your father talks to you about _important_ things—like the night he told you that you were to be assigned a knight. “I don’t want you to be embarrassed about this, but it’s something we need to talk about. Your father knows you listen to me more than you listen to him. And he’s charged me with this conversation. Okay?”

Your heart is beyond racing. “Okay.”

He takes a deep breath and plants both of his palms on his thighs. “You are growing into a lovely young woman. And in a couple of years, you will receive appointments from potential suitors who would like to court you.”

“But you’ll be there, too, right?”

“Of course,” he says quickly, and some relief washes over you. “I would never forgive myself if I didn’t say these next few things to you directly, and not over letters. You…” he sighs, looking for the words. “Please do not feel like you must ever let a man touch you in any way that makes you uncomfortable. Do you understand? If anyone ever makes you think or feel like they’re allowed to or entitled to touch you in any way you don’t like, you tell your father and you tell me. You may get appointments for suitors before that,” and this is what makes him look uncomfortable, anxious even. His eyes are darkened, and his brow is furrowed deeply—he looks much older in this moment. “I do not like that idea, but I want you prepared in case I am not here to protect you. I would like for you to understand the importance of boundaries and that anyone who does not adhere to them need not be in your life. Okay?”

“Okay.” Your fingers are curled into one another, twisting nervously.

“And, about this. Don’t tell your father. I know he wouldn’t like it. But in case there is ever a moment where you need to get physical if someone’s advances seem threatening, I want you to do this,” he says softly, taking one of your hands into his and turning it palm up. “You take this part of your hand,” he traces the heel of your palm with his index finger from his free hand, his eyes lock onto yours and withdraws his finger, “and you push,” he extends his arm, the heel of his hand softly pressing into the tip of your nose, “but hard. Do you understand?” He goes to do the motion again, but when his arm goes back and towards your face, Frederick starts scampering from your pillows and starts growling at Sir Kenobi who laughs, “Looks like you’ll have a protector while I’m away.”

And Frederick pinches part of Sir Kenobi’s trousers in his tiny claw, growls dissipating. Sir Kenobi gently pries the fabric loose, scoops your ghost crab up and lay him on your knee.

“Yes, I understand.” You give Frederick a stern look and scoot him away. He snatches his clam shell and stalks off to your pillows once more.

Sir Kenobi goes from smiling at your small creature, and then back to his serious and searching gaze. “Promise me you’ll tell about anyone who makes uncomfortable.”

“I promise.”

“No eavesdropping.” He taps your knee for emphasis.

“I promise.”  
  
“Behave.”

“I promise.” You roll your eyes. He rolls his back.

He raises his eyebrow at you, eyes twinkling in mirth.

“I’ll try.”

“There’s a girl.” He pushes himself to a standing position and looks down at you for what feels like the last time. His gaze lingers at the lapis lazuli necklace he gifted you last night before.

2

  
It’s been a week since Sir Kenobi left for his crusade, and your father doesn’t know what to do with you.  
  
On the first day, he eyes you suspiciously from his place at the dinner table while you poke listlessly at your vegetables. You hadn’t made so much as a peep all day. Your father puts his cutlery down, “Are you ill?”  
  
“Pardon me?”  
  
“You have been acting so strangely today. You didn’t visit me in my chambers even once.”  
  
You only shrug and make yourself eat a small potato.  
  
He watches you chew. “How were lessons?”  
  
You shrug.  
  
“Professor Mundi tells me that your arithmetic is improving.”  
  
“It is,” you say evenly and stab a carrot.  
  
“He also told me that he didn’t need to get on you about your behavior today.”  
  
You only nod at your cauliflower.  
  
He smiles softly and pokes around at his own vegetables. “I know. I don’t like when he’s away, either.”  
  
  
  


3

  
Like the first day, don’t go to the beach on the second day. Or night. Penelope could wait, you decided.

  
  
4  
  


On the third day, your father doesn’t leave you alone. He even sits in on your morning lessons with you, but not in Sir Kenobi’s chair.  
  
“Darling, please.” He gently grasps your elbow at the end of the lesson when you’re both leaving the study. “I need you to find something to do. I cannot take another moment of this moping. You’re worrying me to death.”  
  
You sigh and trace your finger over one of the arched, stone windows and apologize. “I’m sorry, father, but I can’t stop worrying about— “  
  
“I know, my dearest one. But he wouldn’t want you to sit around, being miserable. Why don’t you go for a walk with Arcade?”  
  
You roll your eyes before the rest of the name falls from your father’s suggestion. Arcade is the temporary reassignment knight in Sir Kenobi’s absence. And he was...not quite the worst, but very close. Firstly, he insisted on only going by Arcade—nobody knew anything else about his identity. Secondly, Arcade had been temporarily demoted to security due to poor behavior in his outfit. Which he constantly reminded you of, in addition to his many conquests: battles with enemies, and with the fairer sex. It made you want to gag. And every time you rolled your eyes behind his back, you missed Sir Kenobi only more fiercely for he wasn’t there to answer your typical call and response. Your father liked Arcade well enough (but not as much as Sir Kenobi)—he was (allegedly) witty and charming. The older girls in the house REALLY liked Arcade: he was charming and (allegedly) handsome.  
  
“I would prefer not to.”  
  


But Arcade finds you when you leave your afternoon lessons for the day—another successful one for Professor Mundi, for you were very well-behaved again and think quite wistfully how proud Sir Kenobi would be.  
  
“Lady Organa,” Arcade greets you with his crooked smile that made the older girls (Adelaide, Margaret, and Phoebe) swoon. He pushes his oily chestnut curls from his forehead and falls into step with you. “Off to the kitchens, I presume?”  
  
“Correct,” you busy yourself with your books and things, rearranging them in your arms to a more comfortable position before his hands invade your personal space and lift them from you. He carries them at his side and you say, “I can carry them just fine.”  
  
He smiles at the furious blush spreading across your features. It is literally from a weak rage and from embarrassment, but he seems to take it a different way. “Anything for milady.”  
  
You want to scream at him that you are anything BUT his lady, but you don’t because you’re closer upon the kitchens now and don’t want to cause a ruckus. You feel like this good behavior thing has hit a perfect streak—almost an entire week now.

When you reach the entryway to the kitchens, Arcade towers over you. Looms over you, really, and you do not like that _at all._ His gray eyes bore into yours and you turn your head away, wanting more than anything to try the palm trick that Sir Kenobi showed you before he left the other day.

He drops his voice, “I can return these to you later tonight…”

But Adelaide pokes her head out the door, frowning, and you can hear Phoebe in the background wondering out loud if your lesson had gone over because you were a little later than usual. Adelaide looks from Arcade to you, and back to Arcade, who backs off and hands your books and things over.

“Hi Addy,” you say somewhat listlessly. Which is normal. She knows you don’t like her, and she doesn’t like you. The other girls are okay. And they think you’re all right. Weird, but all right.

“Go get started with Phoebe.” Adelaide tells you. “I need to check something.”

But that something must be something to do with Arcade because she stays out in the corridor while you all too gladly slip into the kitchens. You know she and Arcade have been… _canoodling_. You’ve caught them (spied on them, really) on more than two handfuls of occasions. Tucked away in dark corners, all over one another, Arcade’s gross and grubby hands sliding their way under her dress, shoving their tongues down each others’ throats. You’re disgusted, but intrigued. And sometimes wonder what it feels like. What it would feel like to do something like that with someone. Someone you trusted, and something like that but toned down.

Maybe a kiss on the cheek.

Or a beauty mark close to gorgeous cerulean eyes.

Phoebe and Margaret are _squealing_ over Arcade when you saddle up next to them at one of the tall counters you all use to knead dough on.

“Lady Organa,” Margaret starts and you try _really_ hard to not roll your eyes. “Is Sir Arcade not uncommonly handsome?”

You just stare at her and Phoebe laughs, asking her own question, “Do you _like_ boys yet?”

Margaret chirps out, laughing in response so you don’t have to answer. “Fee, how can you ask her such a thing when our young Lady Organa only has eyes for Sir Obi.”

Your fingers press into the dough almost painfully at hearing your familiar nickname for your own knight fall from someone else’s lips.

Phoebe squeals in delight, “Is that true, my dear? Do you find Sir Kenobi handsome?”

And you just blush furiously (from a _different_ kind of rage and embarrassment), and punch the dough while denying it. They smile like they believe you.  
  


That night, dreams of Sir Kenobi. Returned to you, grown up himself: much more masculine, more filled out, longer hair, having finally been able to grow a beard. And rushing to you before acknowledging anyone else in the castle to scoop you into his arms and lift you up off the ground in a tight embrace—no ghosting touches, just your chests pressed together and then his fingers toying into your hair framing your face and his forehead pressed into yours, his nose brushing against yours, the small movement communicating full feeling and words to fill the space of three years’ absence. And a soft greeting, always saved up and used only for his returns from travel, “Hello, there.”  
  
You wake yourself up with your own deeply confusing and disturbing crying, and do not leave your rooms the entirety of the next day. Your father does not pester you.  
  
  


5

  
The fourth day, you notice Sir Kenobi has left his heavy, brown hooded cloak pooled on his armchair kept in your bedroom. When you go to pick it up to fold it and set it on your pillows, you find a small leather satchel fall to the floor and spill out some paper. When you kneel to gather everything up you notice it’s a small sack filled with sealed envelopes and a loose sheet. You read the loose sheet first:  
  
 _In the event that my precious goblin finds herself missing her mean old knight, I’ve prepared several ruminations about some of my memories of our time together. I hope these absurd stories being you comfort whenever you feel sad or lonesome. I’ve numbered them for your convenience. Do try and not blow through them all in one evening. I know everything I droll on about is always so riveting._

  
  


6

  
_#1: I knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it to wait longer than a week to read this. Or you may correct me if I’m wrong. But I know you. And your curiosity. I shall not be the least bit surprised if you’ve ripped this open on the first day of my absence._

_Do you remember one of the times you got me in trouble with your father? Because I do. There are a lot. I’m thinking about the time you tricked the older girls into thinking that I was a wizard, and that I’d casted a spell on them that would make their feet grow day by day. And you had stuffed tissues into their shoes without them realizing. The mass panic was absolutely worth being reprimanded by Lord Organa. It would be a shame if you did something that cruel to your new knight assignment…_ _  
  
_

7

  
Your father barges into your rooms on the fifth day of Sir Obi-Wan Kenobi’s absence as you just finished stuffing his cloak into the hiding place behind your chest of clothes.  
  
“WHATISIT?” You say over your shoulder, eyes wide.  
  
He jerks, taken a back. “Hello, my SWEET angel. It should please you to know that Sir Windu has arrived.”  
  
You are enthralled.

Sir Windu, though stern and every bit as serious about the Jedi Codes as Sir Kenobi, was FUN. He had the best stories, and better than that, he gave you riding lessons on his trusted smoky gray stallion called Perseus. Perseus had a purple saddle that you adored, and Sir Windu often let you brush Perseus and braid his mane while listening to Sir Windu tell embarrassing stories about himself or Sir Kenobi when he was under Sir Windu’s charge in the brotherhood.

8

Your father gifts you with your first letter from Sir Kenobi, and you all but fly to your bedroom and barricade the door to read it out loud and in earnest to Frederick who is nesting on Sir Kenobi’s cloak—he usually nests on it daily and you’re sure he idly naps on it all day while you’re hard at work in lessons. The cloak has not left your bed, apart from being shoved into its hiding space. You’d die of embarrassment if your father saw you with it.

  
_‘To My Dearest Mischief-Maker—_

_I have worried myself to near illness, believing with my entire heart that I shall not return to you and home as I know it when my travels end, but instead be greeted by ruins. Why? Because I am not there to stop you from doing what you want. And your chaotic behavior will have finally demolished all limestone and glass to smithereens. Do tell me you’re at least behaving yourself for my sake? I’d like to know that some of my discipline has finally taken with you._

_It was incredibly painful for me to realize not many days ago that we have reached yet another milestone in my assignment to you: I find it simply unbelievable that I have managed to keep you alive for five whole years. Who would have thought it? One of the gentlemen in my company has begun counting the gray hairs sprouting around my whiskers and I suppose I have you to thank for them. And I suppose that you can feel me rolling my eyes at you, however far away I am from you. It is often. I do not know the exact distance I am now from you, I’m afraid—you know very well that I am no cartographer. But I do know it’s been about twenty odd days. I fear that the next however many hundred will go all too slowly and by the time I return to you, you will be fully grown (and perhaps even matured at some point? I jest) and won’t remember who this grumpy old knight is._

_Your father tells me you have been very listless and haven’t been eating, etc. - you must try to keep your spirits up, and I will do the same._ _  
  
_

_Please give my best to Frederick and tell him that I have not seen a creature as gorgeous as he in these distant lands. Did I ever tell you how I came upon your little friend? Frederick was trapped under some seaweed that washed ashore, and I helped untangle him. He IMMEDIATELY told me how pleased he was to have been rescued by such a YOUNG and NOT GROUCHY knight. Yes. Your little friend can speak. I know YOU can’t hear him, but that’s because you are not the one who saved his life. And he’s told me (while you’re away of course) that it absolutely breaks his little crustacean heart when you misbehave for Professor Mundi and don’t listen to your knight who only knows and wants what is best for you._

_I wait patiently to see you upon my return._

_-Yours most forever truly, Obi.’_   
  


9

_‘Dear Obi—_

_I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to receive your letter today. It’s been incredibly boring without you here. My father thinks I’m ill. Or dying. Or both, because I actually am behaving for once. I haven’t even gone to the beach, except to get clams for Frederick. (I don’t think he’s been feeling well. He hasn’t been gorging himself on his clams like usual). And you can re-hinge your jaw—I don’t go to the beach alone. Sir Mace and I take Perseus on walks in the mornings to collect all the clams Frederick needs daily. I’ll have you know I’ve grown up a lot since you’ve been gone. Sneaking out to it is not alluring anymore now that I know you’re not around to YELL at me about it. _

_I do need to tell you about your temporary replacement because I don’t like him, and I’m certain you can feel my ire however far away you are. His name is Arcade, and he claims that he knows you well from the brotherhood—that you went through your trials together. I probably shouldn’t confess this, but Sir Mace does not like him either, and he told me that I should tell you about how much Arcade BOTHERS me. He thinks Frederick is disgusting (seemingly impossible, I know); he insists on carrying my lessons materials; he insists on following me to the kitchens for my lessons with the older girls. They LOVE him. They think he’s charming and handsome (barf)—he is grotesque and obnoxious, at best. He also insists on standing watch in my antechamber at night, and I’m not too fond of that. Even when you were around on your nightly patrols, you never LINGERED like that. He asks me uncomfortable questions. The other night, he asked if I’ve ever kissed a boy; this morning, he asked if I’ve ever kissed a girl. I will tell my father. But I am telling you because you told me to tell you about these things, and because Sir Mace wanted me to, as well._

_Yes, you’ve never lied to me. But I think you’re fibbing about Frederick being able to speak to you. Because HE told ME he’s never uttered a word to you a day in his life, and he’s yet to have told me about this grand rescue._

_-Your rotten goblin.’_

9

For the next several months of you and Sir Kenobi’s correspondences, you begin having side conversations in the post scripts. His first one was in response to your note about him yelling at you about going to the beach at night.

_P.S. I have never yelled at you._

To which, you responded:

_P.S. You have ABSOLUTELY yelled at me: with your wide-eyed death stare. _

_P.S.S. I miss you terribly._

To which, he responded:

_P.S. Fine—I’ll admit it. My eyes MAY yell at you, but you must know I could never raise my voice at you in anger._

_P.S.S. I know; I miss you all the time. Behave._

  
The post scripts are fun, until they’re not.

One day, close to the end of the first year of Sir Kenobi’s absence, you come back to your room after your morning lessons and find Frederick laying on top of his brown cloak, and he’s not moving. You don’t tell Sir Kenobi. But he finds out, anyway.

_‘My Brave One—_

_Your father told me about Frederick’s passing, and I cannot express how solemnly sorry I am for you and that I was not there with you both. Did you know that Frederick was one of the best? And did you also know when a being passes, their soul lives on? Don’t roll your eyes at me—it’s true. Frederick will always be a part of you, and he will always love you. Because you loved him. Now, dry your eyes and chin up, back straight. There’s a girl. I will see you sooner than you know. And I miss you all the time._

_Yours—_

_Obi-Wan.’_

  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader and our dear Sir Kenobi continue their correspondence while he’s away; Arcade gets what’s coming to him; Reader and Sir Windu share a soft moment of friendship; and a mysterious rider shows up for the annual jousting tournament hosted on your grounds.

\--

1

You spend the boredom of your seventeenth year reading the memories Sir Kenobi left behind and exchanging letters with him as frequently as possible.

A lot of his memories involved your earlier years together, and often included Frederick. At first, you couldn’t bear to read because Frederick’s loss was still so fresh in your head, and it was hard not to miss your routines of feeding him in the morning; of being jealous of him getting to sleep on Sir Kenobi’s cloak all day while you had lessons; and of reading books and old letters from Sir Kenobi out loud to him. But you persevered, and kept your chin up and back straight just like Sir Kenobi instructed you to do, and found much solace in his memories once your grieving period ended.

The memories were hilarious, and were a great respite from the usual loneliness you felt daily, even with the interactions you had with professors in your lessons; with interrupting your father’s work; with baking in the kitchens with the older girls. But you still felt like an outsider, and still felt like you didn’t have a true friend. But then you would read Sir Kenobi’s old letters, or his memories, oftentimes shrugged into his cloak even when your room was quite warm.

_Do you remember the time that I had the last of the freshly-squeezed orange juice with breakfast, and you would not speak to me for the rest of the day? And how I had to LOITER in your antechamber, speaking at your bedroom door? Frederick was the only one who would acknowledge me. I remember telling him, “I hope your mistress isn’t too terribly upset with me.” And he responded, “Not to worry, Sir Obi. My mistress is prone to long, anguished, agonizing, dramatic fits and she only ignores those she cares the most about.” And I said, “Too right you are, Frederick, she is very lucky that I rescued you from those seaweeds all those months ago.” And HE told ME that you could never know the true nature of his rescue, for you wanted to think him as infallible as you once did of me.”_

So, you would begin drawing Frederick in the corners of your letters to Sir Kenobi where there was blank space, his left claw bigger than his right one, just like he had been in real life. Sir Kenobi delighted in this and began drawing him as well, in the same fashion. But his Fredericks began to include little speech bubbles positioned over his eyes that included instructions: Go to sleep; eat your vegetables; be nice to your teachers; tell me everything; go to sleep. BEHAVE.

Once the doodling proved to be an effective way to lift your spirits while writing him (and his responses), you decided to take it up a notch and start sending him small gifts along with your letter. This was an exercise to see if he would respond in the same way. Much of your behaviors around one another evolved into a sort of call and response.

The first item you send is a small piece of stone that you assumed must have fallen off the castle. You send it with a note:

_I am writing you from a secondary location; you were right—I did tear the place to smithereens. You won’t have a home to return to. We now live in the grotto behind the woods. At least we have water._

To which, he sent a single, lumpy, poorly smithed nail and a note:

_I’m incredibly saddened to learn that you were unable to master your rage while I was away. I hope this gives you a fine start to building a shack in the woods. Living in the grotto is fine; but the weather will turn sour, and then where will you be? Rage alone cannot shelter you from the most tempestuous of climes._

You’d sent another that said:

_I’m not sure who told me this, but I remember they were very old and extremely grouchy when they said it: Be mindful of your thoughts. They betray you. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I would love nothing more than to practice that palm-to-nose trick you taught me, but on Arcade. Maybe even Adelaide._

To which he responded:

_So uncivilized. It would be a terrible shame if someone put Sir Arcade in his place. I pity this old, grouchy knight. He sounds like he should lighten up some._

You sent him another gift. Something you’d been working on in your crafting hours. A turquoise colored ribbon, embroidered with you and Frederick’s monograms, and small lettering etched into it: ‘tell me everything. no eavesdropping. behave. go to sleep.’ It took up the entire length of the fabric. Your note that accompanied it said:

_More wise words from a decrepit and miserable knight._

And his response:

_I shall wear your snarky little rag around my wrist with pride. The other knights tease me about it incessantly. They say it is all in a good natured way, but I don’t think so. I’ve heard whispers that they think me strange, and this latest accoutrement only further proves their suspicions. I’m so glad I received it from somebody so well-adjusted and not at all a little oddball herself._

Other times, your letter would offer small confessions:

_I fear that my eyes will unlearn how to roll back into my head with such skilled and practiced grace. I find myself having grown up and matured like you always believed I wouldn’t: I tend not to roll my eyes nearly as much as I did when I had someone to roll them at._

And he would respond, or offer his own:

_I must tell you that once I stopped rolling my eyes so much, I’ve developed perfect vision. Hopefully yours will restore itself through this practice of kindness, and you will not use your newfound powers for evildoing such as spying at great distance. Behave. _

Some more small gifts you send from time to time, albeit stranger ones:

_These two gray hairs are from one of my professors and my father. They said these are from me; I don’t believe it._

He sends a hair back:

_Believe it. Look what you do to me while miles away._

And, you tease him:

_I’ve been told a slew of embarrassing stories about you while you were still in training, like the time that someone compromised your greaves and they fell off during sparring practice and you had to stand there in your underwear because you neglected to put trousers on under them._

And his responses:

_I am positively outraged and wounded over you believing in these stories. I wish you could see me shaking my head at such inaccurate accounts. Whoever is spinning these yarns are telling them wrongly. I have never done anything embarrassing in all my life. I am a man without flaw, remember?_

2

But towards the end of your seventeenth year, you send Sir Kenobi a somewhat terse letter. It is so, because you have not heard from him in almost two months. But you know that he is alive and well because he is in regular correspondence with your father. You know the tone of the letter is also affected by your recent interaction with Arcade. He’d been waiting for you outside of your lesson rooms (again), and insisted on walking you to the kitchens (again), and took your books and things saying that he would love to return them to you in the night (again).

Over a year’s worth of wrath surges from your elbow to wrist and its full force is exchanged from your palm—like Sir Kenobi taught you, what seems like ages and ages ago—to Arcade’s nose. The impact is righteous and true, and fills you with such satisfaction that you are left breathless and in want of knowing what it would be like to use your body in other ways as instructed by Sir Kenobi.

Adelaide flies out of the kitchen when she hears his shout, laced with a curse at you, and she goes to him, cradling him in her arms as though you committed a war crime and mortally wounded him. He is only on his knees and cradling his bleeding nose.

“What the fuck is your _problem_?!” Adelaide yells at you, wiping the blood from Arcade’s nose with her stark white apron.

“She attacked me!” Arcade all but wails. “I was only trying to help carry her things to her lesson with you, Addie.”

“I know, you poor sweet thing,” she coos, and for the first time in a long time you roll your eyes and it feels _glorious_ and _liberating._

She tells your father, demands punishment, and you are sent to your rooms.

You write to your knight.

_Dear Obi,_

_I don’t know if you’ve heard from my father (because apparently the two of you engage in secret correspondence and gossip about me all the time), but the Supreme Chancellor of Naboo was scheduled for a preliminary visit with me just last week. He brought with him his niece, Padme, who I absolutely adored. Chancellor Palpatine, not so much. But Padme is only a year younger than I, and we have many things in common._

_It turns out that she has her own knight, as well, but she isn’t allowed to do anything ever ever. I told her about one young charge I’d heard rumors of and how SHE’D been stuck with a wretched old man of a knight (I believe the assignment has gone on six years now) and how he leaves his charge by her lonesome almost always. She said that he doesn’t sound like a very good knight, and indeed, sounds CRUEL, CRUDE, AND RUDE. I told her that I couldn’t agree more. Could you imagine? Being under constant surveillance by a man without flaws, and who constantly lectures you to behave yourself? And just off and goes away anytime he pleases? I’m so glad you aren’t like that at all, and that I only write these letters down for my health. _

_Padme is beautiful and clever and so smart. She is so well-read, and a bit feisty too. She doesn’t let her uncle run all over her. Which I wish my father would grant me permission to do—instead, I’ve been stuck with the instruction to behave like a LADY and titter on like a small bird over everything that he says. Father tells me it’s important that I be especially nice to Chancellor Palpatine, for he is one of the most powerful and influential men in the Republic. And that if he chooses to court me, it could bring about a strong alliance that could influence more peace across the lands._

_I don’t like him; there’s something not quite right about him. His smiles don’t reach his eyes, and his laughing sounds hollow. I tried to coax more information about him out of Padme when she and I were left to our own devices, briefly, while the others had VERY IMPORTANT MAN TALK. But she wouldn’t say a word. She’s agreed to become a pen pal of mine, so hopefully she divulges more information in the future and from prying ears. _

_Father and the rest are making plans for the annual jousting games, and we’ve hired extra hands to work the tiltyard, which is infuriating because that’s where I go to hide from my father and our sordid visitors and to sulk._

_The one person I don’t hide from is of course Sir Mace, and he’s been coming around more frequently with Perseus. I don’t know if you or my father have written to him to tell him how ILL WITH GRIEF I am over this malaise and ennui, but it is welcome. Sir Mace is teaching me how to ride Perseus, and he is such a sweet old horse. (Perseus, not Sir Mace). Sir Mace said that he will return for my eighteenth birthday, and I can only hope that you will perhaps be home soon enough to see me for that, too. But I guess not. I don’t know if I should even expect a letter at this point. I have begged father to not make it a massive to-do, and he has at least granted me that. I told him for that kindness, I shall not want for a gift from him. _

_The Chancellor will return and be staying with us throughout the games when they start up. I really do hope you’ll be home by then. I don’t know if there will be a castle left to return to if I’m to be boarded up with he and Arcade for very long._

_-Your wrathful hell-demon._

_P.S. I struck Arcade in the way that you taught me to. I have never felt better in all my life._

3

Weeks later, when you are poking around in your father’s chambers because he has business outside on the grounds in preparation for the tiltyard’s future renovations, you find a particularly thick and heavy envelope addressed in Sir Kenobi’s familiar scrawl. You glance at the entryway to the chambers and consider closing the door, but your aching curiosity gets the better of you and you deftly slip the parchment out and begin reading with the speed of a bat freshly escaped from hell:

_My Dearest Lord Organa,_

_I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve been finding it egregiously difficult to eat or sleep. Traveling has worn me down and my energy levels are incredibly low. I miss home more and more every day and I feel with each additional trek we make, I should never return. I hope that you are faring well with my replacement. From what I hear from the lady of the house, he is not up to snuff and for that, I offer my most sincere apologies. I thought he would have been a more apt fit that he has been. You will recall that he and I went through our training and trials together. He was also the one who crafted that sordid rumor about me; I am met with newfangled surprise at each destination we reach—the rumor has spread much farther than I could ever have possibly imagined. Though, I would be a liar if I said that I wasn’t greatly amused by it and Arcade’s simplistic…wit._

_The whispers of wide-spread discontent related to trade routes and taxation grow only louder, despite my negotiations being made on the behalf of the Republic. Though meetings seem amicable and true, I know that they are filled with falsehoods._

(They’re lying to your face, Obi-Wan. You think to yourself.)

_Our negotiations at Neimoidia’s capital were much like life is for some: nasty, brutish, and short. Qui-Gon and I were elected to meet with Nute Gunray and some of his ambassadors and assistants, only to be met with some Separatist soldiers that we were forced to do nothing else but slaughter._

(You are shaking at reading this part. None of this was in his previous letters to you. Perhaps that’s why he has been avoiding writing to you. Never matter, if he could have his own secrets, so would you—you wouldn’t tell him that you found this letter.)

_There are rumors of a bad actor in a far off place that nobody can name: the person or the location. But he is much like a phantom, and is disrupting nations’ beliefs in the Republic. I have heard he has ties to the Trade Federation, as well. I fear for the Republic, and I fear for our democracy._

_It is not in my nature to harm others, you know this. I am sworn to be a protector, and to keep the peace. With this last assignment, I feel like I have done neither and have not accomplished either since I left home. Another anxiety that has me fretting and losing sleep and appetite is related to the letters I receive from the lady of the house: she’s told me constantly about the murmurs coming from all corners of the castle that she should be expecting appointments from potential suitors any moment now. I promised her that I would never lie to her. And it makes me ill to omit information about my business in my responses to her, you must understand. But I understand it is your wish that she be shielded from such mounting and evolving treachery._

_Again, this is what I have been assigned to your small family for. I wish to be home before any of these appointments take place. With your permission and approval, I would like to humbly request a swift termination to my current contract. My charge has always been to serve you and the Lady Organa since my knighting and while I may not need to tell you how dear my loyalty will always be to the brotherhood, my sworn oath to my charge takes precedence and always has. You must understand—I implore you assist however necessary to ensure an expedited termination or shortening of this particular assignment occurs. I will beg if I must; I will do what I must. _

_Your faithful servant,_

_Obi-Wan Kenobi._

You read the letter again, and again. The fourth time, you notice that these words are a year old, and you wonder if your father has put any effort into addressing Sir Kenobi’s pleas. You put the letter back in the exact way that you found it.

You don’t feel bad about your own snarky letter send to Sir Kenobi until you lay down for the night, and are filled with horrific images of him ‘slaughtering’ someone. You decided, finally, that you will keep behaving, in a childish hope that if you do as he asks, it may will him to return sooner.

4

Mace comes to visit you on your eighteenth birthday, as promised. He’s heard from your father and your knight that you’ve taken a keen interest in cartography.

“I can’t imagine why,” he offers one of his small half-smiles that fills you with an intense affection for whom you consider a dear, dear friend. “Obi-Wan and I never really picked it up in our own lessons.”

“I want to master something that both of you were unable to do.”

“Ah, well. Full steam ahead.” He offers you a sack of sorts and when you’ve unfurled it upon the small desk in your bedroom, you find that its filled with strange instruments and sheafs of parchment.

“It’s all second-hand,” he admits, silently shaming himself for not being wealthier.

“It’s all perfect,” you say softly, turning the instruments over in your hands, feeling their cool hardness with your fingertips: drafting devices, compasses, quills with the finest, most precise nibs.

“I’m sure you’ll pick it all up just fine.”

“Thank you, Mace.” You beam up at him.

“You’re very welcome.”

“As it turns out, I have something for you, as well.” You move towards your old wooden trunk that keeps your sleep clothes and things, and pull out a caparison that you’ve been crafting on and off for almost a year.

“But it’s _your_ birthday,” he points out. His look of curiosity doesn’t ebb away, though. And you love even more him for that.

“This is for you and Perseus,” you say, tugging the massive cloth free and handing it over in a bundle. “I just wanted to thank you so much for being here for me while Sir Kenobi’s been away. It has meant more than words can say that you’ve chosen to spend so much of your off-duty time with me, teaching me how to ride Perseus, letting me groom him. Just listening to me. Being there for me. Being my friend. I don’t have many.”

“I don’t have many, either. But I am fortunate to call you my friend.”

“I know how expensive caparisons are. I just wanted Perseus to wear something that was made with love. It’s not very elegant, and there are visible mistakes. I’ve found some inconsistencies.”

He holds a palm up. “Stop. I love it. And so will Perseus. This is probably the nicest thing someone has ever done for me and has ever gifted me. Thank you, milady.”

After your birthday dinner with your father and Sir Windu, you return to your room to find a letter and small parcel on your bed.

You open the parcel first. It is a slender and thin, delicate golden bracelet. It’s a bit scuffed and looks worn, like it’s gone through trouble on its trip to reach you. There is one smooth purple stone set in it.

And the note, in Sir Kenobi’s script:

_This stone is supposed to make you patient. We shall see if it’s true. It is amethyst, which is the stone of happiness. I’m told it promotes sincerity and patience; heals negativity; and encourages contentment. Happy Birthday, my fierce little gremlin. You shall see me sooner than you know. But that does not make me mourn your absence any less, and I miss you all the time. Ever truly yours, Obi-Wan._

5

Months go by and the castle’s tiltyard (or, jousting arena) that your father and others fretted upon for months and months is finally ready for the opening day of the games that are held annually, and that your father sponsors the events each year. Your father, known to all as Lord Organa, is the Lord of Honour for these particular games, and you sit as a Lady of the Court now that you are of age. Padme sits with you as another Lady of the Court since she is a guest of honour, and Chancellor Palpatine sits as a guest judge, second to your father. The Chancellor makes sure that he wedges himself between you and Padme.

Spectators are crammed in the wooden stands on either side of the tilt barrier. The crowd isn’t split into who favors which rider, but rather, by whatever they paid (or didn’t) to attend.

“The Scoring of the game is fairly simple,” the announcer starts. “The horsemen earn one point if their lances touch. A shattered lance will earn him five points, and an unhorsing will earn him ten points. Horsemen must release their horse’s reigns before making a move, or will be penalized one point. Negative points are earned when a horseman hits the other fellow’s horse, or go for his fellow’s helmet. Bonus points will be awarded for chivalric demonstrations and the execution of daring equestrian martial arts skills.” Chivalric displays and equestrian martial arts maneuvers are assessed with each run by the Court of Honour, who serve as the judges of the games. You smile at memories of earlier games where Sir Kenobi was almost always awarded for extra points for chivalry.

Chancellor Palpatine’s rider is a man in obsidian gear streaked with reds and golds with a manticore charge and horned helmet. His name is Lord Maul, and most have never seen his true face. It is rumored he has the eyes of the devil himself: molten gold, and black irises that flicker and dance like Hell’s hottest flames. Lord Maul’s presence gives you a feeling that he will not earn additional points for chivalric displays, but will for the theatrics—you have heard that he is an extremely skilled equestrian martial artist, among other sorts of combat and games.

You notice Perseus first, draped in the clumsy and inelegant caparison. His rider has donned Sir Kenobi’s heraldry: azure (blue) and argent (silvery white), chevron ordinaries, and without any charges—he’s yet to have selected an animal, which makes him stand out to others. You cannot fathom who would be so bold to borrow Sir Kenobi’s gear, and hope that it was Mace especially since Perseus was selected for this particular round. So, you ask your father, who is seated at your left. Chancellor Palpatine stirs on your right as though trying to hear what you are about to ask your father. 

“Father is Mace—erm, I mean Sir Windu riding for you today?”

Your father only gives you a mischievous smile that brightens his eyes in a way that you haven’t seen for a long time. You smile back and then roll your eyes believing the rider to be Arcade, whose idiocy would of course make him brave enough to use Sir Kenobi’s riding gear. 

But then, Perseus comes to a slow trot, and you are gifted a single aster (signifying wisdom and devotion; a flower you are always gifted at the games) and the rider pushes the visor of his helmet up enough for you to catch a glimpse of cerulean? aquamarine? eyes that then roll at you with what appears to be ages of pent up exasperation. You clutch the aster’s stem and lose the feeling in your legs as a warm excitement licks your insides from somewhere behind your bellybutton. And you somehow spring to your feet and run after Perseus, who has sped up and halted at his starting point of the tilt barrier. 

You halt right before Perseus, still clutching the aster with a now sweat-slicked palm, cheeks flushed and chest heaving from excitement and from the sprint. The rider dismounts and kneels before you while removing his helmet, and looks up at you with a teasing gaze. 

He looks the same. But also, absolutely different. He looks like a dream. Like your dream. He’s _older_. A weariness is etched around his eyes but the crinkles full of mirth remain and are all but screaming at you in this moment. His amber hair is much longer, to his shoulders, tucked behind his ears, and impossibly gorgeous—you had no idea his short buzz cut could have ever grown into something so....well, pretty. The reds, the blondes...the so few silvery whites. And his scruff. Not quite a full on beard, but the same rich colors as his hairs, and vibrant against the pale azure and argent colors of his gear. 

“My Lady,” he smirks up at you, pleased with himself at having fully surprised you. 

“I cannot believe you,” you say breathlessly, grinning like an absolute idiot over seeing his stupid face. “I will never forgive you for not telling me you returned.”

“I apologize.”

You roll your eyes. He rolls his back. 

And something breaks deep inside of you that you know you’ll struggle with hiding once you return to the courts table. 

You go to undo your necklace and lean down a bit to place it around his neck and hear the announcer, “The Lady of the Court gifts Sir Kenobi with a favour.” There is applause. 

“I cannot believe you,” is all you can say again, and let out a laugh that is laced with relief and love. What is it that you cant believe? His absence? How much you missed him? His cheeky letters? His odd gifts sent with them?His surprise return? His hair? Him showing up in time for the annual games? His beard? His hair?

He grins up at you more brightly. “I apologize.”

“You do not.”

“I do not.”

You run your hand through his hair and give it an affectionate tug and he leans into your hand, nose nuzzling into your wrist. It is miniscule and nobody sees. 

He pushes himself up and looks down at you, almost forlornly, almost wistfully, his eyes the softest you’ve ever seen. And you both speak the same thing at the same time. 

“Tell me everything.”

This makes you both smile in the same embarrassment, and he punctuates the request with a promise and near-silent, “Tonight.”

You find your seat again, somewhat nervously, and your father rests an assuring hand on your knee that you cover with yours.

Once Sir Kenobi is mounted upon Perseus again, the announcer asks the horsemen if they have dedications for their performances. Lord Maul does not.

“And you, Sir?” The announcer turns his attentions to Sir Kenobi.

“Indeed. I, Obi-Wan Kenobi, dedicate this performance in the name of Lady Organa; whomst companionship I am forever grateful, and am eternally honored to be in her service. I pray that this performance serves as a fair and true demonstration of my devotion to my sworn oath to serve and protect her, and well as my unyielding and undying loyalty.”

You stand and offer a small curtsy in appreciation and acknowledgment. “And I am forever grateful for your unwavering fidelity of these past seven years, Sir Kenobi. Good luck.”

He gives you one of his grins that show almost all of his teeth before slipping his visor shut, and you sit down on legs that don’t want to work.

“There will be eight runs in this particular match,” the announcer continues once the polite applause has ended. “Gentlemen. When you hear the horn blast, you may charge.”

Sir Kenobi shatters Lord Maul’s lance in the first, and is awarded five points.

Once Lord Maul has a replacement lance in the second run, he goes for Perseus, aiming his lance at Perseus’s chamfron which is his metal face protection. Sir Kenobi sees this in time, and jerks Perseus out of the way, and slows him to a trot in a direction away from the tilt barrier. Chancellor Palpatine gives him a score of Failure to Present—which is typically reserved for displays of cowardice—and is awarded negative ten points; Maul gets a warning. You argue that Maul should be given the Failure to Present, as he clearly was making an illegal move aimed at Perseus—Padme hears you; the Chancellor does not.

Sir Kenobi unhorses Lord Maul in the third run, earning his ten points back. The crowd goes wild, but there is some jeering, and you can feel the Chancellor stiffen near you. You know this, because he’s taken any slight movement of his or yours as an opportunity to (what he believes to be ) covertly move closer to you.

On the fourth run, Lord Maul goes for Sir Kenobi’s helmet instead of his designated gridded grand guard which is his shield, and is supposed to be Lord Maul’s target. But Sir Kenobi again slows Perseus, leading him away from the tilt barrier, and jumps off of Mace’s steed, falling hard, and injuring his shoulder on impact. You grip your father’s hand and he gives you a gentle squeeze. You feel him tense, as though he is about to stand and run into the field and to your knight. The murmuring of spectators reaches a loud, buzzing hum: this is the first time Sir Kenobi has ever been unhorsed in a game, and it was through obvious cheating. Everybody is shaken.

When Sir Kenobi is on his feet again, there is a deafening cheer from all sides of the stands. But he is awarded, at your request, negative ten points for dismounting Perseus instead of a second Failure to Present that Chancellor Palpatine is pushing for. A second would have eliminated him from the game entirely. And Chancellor Palpatine, vouches for Lord Maul’s intent to hit (“obviously the boy meant to go for the guard, who would ever go for a helmet?”), and Lord Maul is let off without a warning.  
  


Sir Kenobi unhorses Lord Maul on the fifth run.

On the sixth run, Lord Maul makes a barricade—an illegal move—but Palpatine gets him off without a warning once more. 

  
On the seventh run, Lord Maul shatters Sir Kenobi’s lance, earning five points.

On the eighth run, their lances touch, which should have been called as a draw with a re-run to follow, but Lord Maul manages to unhorse Sir Kenobi (which would not ordinarily count, due to the draw hit), but Chancellor Palpatine counts it, anyway.

By the time you deliberate with the rest of the court, awarding final moment points for chivalry and daring, the two riders have come to a tie and you are not happy. Not because Sir Kenobi didn’t win, but because of the rampant cheating and obvious cruelty displayed by Lord Maul, and the Chancellor’s glib reactions to it.

6

Later that night, after the fanfare of the grand dinner that usually follows the opening day of the annual games (with the castle full of people), you’re pretending to read a book (in the dark, no candles lit whatsoever), waiting impatiently for Sir Kenobi, and are filled with a wild thought that the stone on your bracelet doesn’t work.

You wished for Frederick to be here. The waiting was painful.

Then comes the knock that you never thought you’d hear again—the particular pattern and pressure asking permission to enter. You shout out your consent, like you did so long ago when he last visited you. And he pushes your door open. And you spring to your feet, and he immediately starts laughing at you with wide eyes.

You forgot that you’d been wearing his cloak. Throwing it around your shoulders had become so ingrained in your nightly routine that it was second nature to shrug into.

“Have you been sleeping with my cloak for two years?”

“What?! No! Of course not!” As if to prove it, you all but rip it from your body and hold it in your trembling hands. Nerves from being caught in an embarrassing situation? Or something else?

He steps closer and tugs at the tip of the sleeve dangling from your embrace. “Then I should like it back,” he tells you with a quirked eyebrow.

You roll your eyes. He rolls his.

“No,” you say, tugging it closer to your chest. “You were gone so long. You left it in my room. It’s technically mine now.”

“Oh, is that true, little one?” He tugs harder, this time gaining some purchase on the fullness of the sleeve.

You don’t relent, and hold your ground, chin tilted up at him in defiance. “Yes.”

He scrunches his nose in response and gives one last hard tug that jolts you forward, bumping you into his chest, your fronts separated only by the well-worn and well-loved cloak. Your heart leaps and your blood pounds in your ears and you stare at his beauty mark, and try to count the lines around his eyes that were not there before. He lets go of the cloak’s sleeve, and instead brushes away your hair that has fallen into your face and sighs, “Hello, there.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary: In which Reader and our dear Sir Kenobi catch up with one another; Reader and Padme spend some time together; the tournament comes to a close; and Reader stumbles upon her knight in an intimate moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: Explicit! Mature! 18+! Smutty things happen!
> 
> Warnings: Mentions of violence and blood; unwanted advances are made towards Reader by Palpatine; male masturbation; female masturbation/sexual awakening. (Remember, Reader is of-age now).
> 
> Note: This chapter is over 9,000 words long so I apologize for any errors.

\--

1

You go to pass his cloak to him, and he goes to receive it, but withdraws his hand at the last moment.

“It’s fine,” he says. “You can really keep it.”

“I don’t want it now,” you shrug, and delight in his gaping at your flippancy.

“Because I’m letting you have it.”

“Precisely.”

“You are simply monstrous.”

You scoff at this and sit down on your bed and look at him expectantly. “How’s your shoulder? It looked like you hit the ground pretty hard.” You try to sound not too terribly concerned.

He shrugs, if not crookedly, like he’s trying not to move it. “I’ll survive. It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

He’s almost shying away from you, lingering closer to your now-closed bedroom door. Like he can’t decide if he wants to stay or leave. He decides to stay, but lowers himself into the armchair that you haven’t moved or touched in his two-year absence. Your chest aches when he crosses his legs in that familiar way. Like he’s readying for meditation, but the only thing he’s focusing on is you.

“Would you like to keep my chair, as well?” He teases, smile shadowed around his whiskers., fingers playing around in them.

“If you’re going to be cruel to me, then you aren’t allowed to stay.”

“Then I shall leave,” he pushes himself off the chair and your head is raining exclamation marks, all begging him to stay.

But he does, he just restlessly stands around and it bothers you.

You raise your eyebrow at him doubtfully and reach out and up to gently prod his injured shoulder with your fingertips and he flinches away from you. You roll your eyes, “Remember that time you said you don’t lie to me?”

He rolls his eyes back at you. “If I knew that you would someday memorize everything I have ever written to you, I would have noted more important matters.”

You want to tell him that very few things are more important to you than his pledge of honesty.

“I did not memorize your letters,” you defend yourself, successfully fighting off a furious blush.

But you _had_ memorized his letters. Not all of them. And not every word. Just _some_ things: ‘I miss you all the time’; ‘Yours most forever truly’; ‘You shall see me sooner than you know’. And now that he’s back, here in your most intimate of meeting spaces, it was like he’d never left at all. And you wonder if everything else was just an incredibly boring dream.

He just smiles at your retort, and shuffles around your room, and you wonder if he’s memorized _your_ letters or phrases or your cheeky nicknames you used to sign them with.

“I see you still have Frederick’s little house.” He’s walked over to it, where its settled at the far corner of your desk, and he taps the glass almost wistfully, as though expecting Frederick to hurl sand to and fro’ to unearth himself and rush over to Sir Kenobi’s fingers pressed into the glass. You think, stunned that you hadn’t realized this before, that Sir Kenobi even had his own special knock for Frederick when he came to visit. 

You’d always found it endearing that he called the small glass encasing Fredericks ‘house’—you always thought that calling it a ‘habitat’ was much more sophisticated. It was a small glass rectangle filled with sand from the very beach Sir Kenobi (allegedly) rescued him from, and large shells that Frederick would hide in. Frederick only ever slept in his house—he had free reign of your bed and rooms in his waking hours—so you had never felt so bad about him not having a larger space.

“I haven’t found it in my heart to get rid of it yet,” you admit, watching him trace his fingers over the glass and still drum out the soft knock with the tips.

“If it is too painful to get rid of and too painful to look at while empty, we could turn it into a terrarium?”

“What is that?” You always felt something indescribable in your chest whenever you had to ask him about things that you felt like you should know about. It was a self-conscious thing, and he would have chided you about it had he known you thought it. But you are so well read, and you always feel as if you should know more than you do. Sometimes, you are filled with twinges of something unnamable—pangs of ignorance?—and wished that there was a common ground between you both: something you were equal in not knowing about.

His voice pulls you out from your self-deprecating thoughts. “I saw them at a market square when we were passing through Naboo while I was away.”

The name makes your stomach jolt, but you focus on paying all of your attention to Sir Kenobi and his eyes, and how expressive they always were when he told a story: bright, and dramatic at all the right parts in the narrative. “They’re like…little houses for dry plants. And flowers. We could go on a walk, and collect some things that you like?”

“Maybe,” you sigh, a bit too dramatically, emotionally exhausted at the thought of being disrespectful to or disruptive of Frederick’s space.

Sir Kenobi wrinkles his nose at you and gives a playful smile before echoing you, “ _Maybe_.” But, he can tell you’re silently fretting. “What is it? Tell me?”

“Naboo—hearing it just makes me think of the Chancellor.”

“I’ve been wanting to know if you could tell me more about him. From what I’d heard during my time away from you, he seems to be all right. At least liked by enough? I don’t want to say _well_ -liked.”

You wait to see if he’s going to tell you anything else about his time away, especially if its anything related to what you’d read in his letter to your father.

Instead, he shuffles around your room in silence, troubled, and you want to say, ‘tell me everything’, but you don’t. And he stops this wandering before his own fretting rears up like it sometimes does, and he sits down next to you on your bed.

“Do you know anything else about him, little one?”

You answer as though his new nickname for you doesn’t affect you in some _kind_ of way you’ve never felt before with his other names. This one isn’t teasing like the others: it is sincere, but also feels dangerous. “He doesn’t have an aversion to cheating. In games.”

He swats at your knee. You swat his hand away.

“He likes sitting too close to me.” You don’t miss the irony of him sitting too closely to you, and he doesn’t either. But he also doesn’t move any closer or any further away from you.

Sir Kenobi scrunches his nose again.

“I don’t like it,” you tell him.

A loose sound comes from his throat, as though it is a laugh laced with relief, and a swell of pride surges through you and a kind of excitement that kind of makes your stomach hurt, but also doesn’t.

“Have you told your father?”

“No.”

“He’d like to know.”

“I’m sure he’d like to know everything about me,” you huff out, and you wonder if in Sir Kenobi’s eyes you are once again the petulant child he left for the first time, years ago, when you were twelve and cursing at mirrors and sneaking out to the beach in the dead of night.

“He would.” Sir Kenobi says this gently, and you believe him. You love your father—he’s just _so much more difficult_ to talk to than Sir Kenobi. You know that your father would like to know everything about you, but you also know that (at least for this stage in your life) you couldn’t tell him everything like you could with your knight.

The sun glares orange and slowly still works towards tucking itself beyond the ocean’s horizon. You both watch.

He wants to know more, of course. “Do you know if he is staying here longer than the tournament?”

“My father promised me that he is only here for the tournament. But he has made it apparent to me, just as Padmé has, that he has an interest in me. I don’t know if he’ll court me. He seems too old.”

“You’d be surprised.” But Sir Kenobi’s jaw is stern, and you don’t like the way his brow is furrowed nor the worry lines etching deeper into his face that has grown tan since he’s been away. “His Lord Maul seems to be a very cruel man; I don’t know how benevolent the Chancellor can be if that is who he elects to guard his person and affairs.”

You frown at the word ‘affair’, having learned the myriad meanings it holds. The thought of a love affair with Chancellor Palpatine absolutely rots your gut from the inside out.

“Just don’t forget what I told you about men. And boundaries.” He pokes your knee much like he did all those ages ago when you had another serious conversation with him in this very position.

The sun tries its best to blind you when you look out the window again, and when you look back at your knight, you almost lose the power to speak: its glint against his hair glows gorgeous. He truly is a man now, and that not-knowing-how-to feel helplessness you first tasted yesterday when he took his riding helmet off returns. But you do speak, trying to be humorous, to quell this strange fretting that warns you could turn feral. “I so want to strike him like I did Arcade.”

Sir Kenobi’s worry lines dissipate, and his amber hair is burning, and his fingers toy in his same-colored scruff. “Okay—I want to know everything about that. First of all, I _cannot believe you_ that—”

“Oh, _you_ cannot believe _me_?” You’d be lying if you didn’t admit to yourself that him echoing your greeting to him at the games earlier didn’t stir up a flicker of excitement in your chest.

“No, I cannot believe you! I cannot believe that you would send me _pages and pages_ of your complaints about this man—a taxonomy of every wrongdoing—and then the big climax of this saga was quite literally a postscript?”

“I was angry at you,” you say simply. “I hadn’t heard from you; I didn’t think you deserving of the juicy details.”

“Well…have I earned a right to your juicy details by now?”

“Please don’t describe things as juicy ever again.”

He waves your request away. “I want to hear this first person; tell me again what you did to Arcade. I want every...regular... detail.”

And so, you relay the ongoing harassments; the tailing; the weird comments about him returning your things to you at night. Sir Kenobi did NOT like any of this story. But he DID like the part about your years’ worth of frustration breaking his nose.

“I couldn’t take it anymore, Obi,” you say, not even realize you’ve dropped his title.

Your face is flushed from the excitement of retelling your victory, and you pull your arm back and softly demonstrate the move he taught you on him and in a flash—his keen reflexes always filled with a mystic sort of foresight—he grabs the back of your hand and stops your movement.

And he just looks at you, his eyes still shining from the mirth brought on by his laughter, just looks at you, his eyes shining from also hearing your laughter. You try to count the different colors of blue, and the ghostly glimmering green boring into you. And you try to count the lines around his eyes that weren’t there before, and that pool of excited heat returns to your stomach. But it’s lower, twisting and surging, and he draws your hand closer and closer until his long golden red eyelashes flutter shut and he’s pressing his lips to the soft, sensitive skin at the inside of your wrist before pressing his nose into it like he did earlier in the day.

He kisses you there tentatively, and the pool of heat is now gushing, and your shuddering gasp encourages him to kiss you again, but more firmly this time. And your free hand, seemingly of its own accord, moves towards his hair and your fingers press into his amber locks, some silvery strands sneak in between your fingers and your chest thuds and heaves over the sight. His hair is soft and inviting and you want to touch all of it, and this frustrated longing turns into an affectionate tug that earns you a more fervent nose press, and another kiss that leaves his lower lip tracing a miniscule line up to your palm.

Your fingers travel and tug another small fistful of hair elsewhere, and his sigh is melodic. Your stomach hurts; you tuck his hair behind his ear before stilling your trembling fingers into his whiskers, spreading them out across his cheek, reeling from the coarse difference here, and tugging at the coarser hair there. His eyelashes tickle your wrist when they flutter, but don’t open and you take the opportunity to study his face and your gaze rests upon his beauty mark that frequented your dreams more often than you’d ever admit: to yourself, and even to Frederick. And before you can even think, and even stop yourself, you lean forward, and press the tip of your nose to it. _‘How I have missed you,’_ you think you keep to yourself, but you must have said it aloud, for he answers with a quiet,

“I know.”

And then, he opens his eyes, and they’re burning aquamarine, and you let go of each other as though burned.

He draws away from you and stands again, arms crossed against his chest, one palm rubbing at his bicep briskly. He turns his back to you and stares at your desk. You’re worried he’s about to say something that’ll hurt your feelings. Instead, it’s a sweet chuckle, as he observes your birthday gifts from Sir Windu. “I cannot believe you became such a good student in my absence. I have failed you.”

He’s composing himself, turning to humor, like you did. You work to compose yourself—its hard. And you think again about how your bracelet must be broken.

When he faces you again, there’s something searching in his gaze, but all he says is, “Go to sleep.”

But you won’t.

2

You don’t go to sleep because you promised Padmé that you would so chivalrously rescue her from her guest tower and show her what its like to sneak out of a castle by lantern. You make it to the threshold of the dunes and help her down the small makeshift plan, and into the sand.

“Listen to those waves,” she marvels in a soft sigh that makes your chest ache with affection. “I can see why you like coming out here so much.”

“I haven’t come out as often in recent years.” You kick up a clump of wet sand as you both tread the frigid tide with your bare feet. “I promised Sir Obi I wouldn’t while he was away.”

She gives you a mischievous grin in the moonlight. “Well, he’s returned; you’ll have to come out here more often.” She pauses for a beat, marveling at the lighting and the moon and the clear stars. “We don’t have anything like this in Naboo. The lake country is of course gorgeous. Breath-taking, even. But you don’t hear sounds like these.”

“It’s something else entirely,” you say as though you’ve traveled from your home even once in your life. In a way, you have: through Sir Kenobi’s stories and books you’d read. “But I would love to see these lakes you speak of.”

Her eyes shine bright at you in the dark. “Then you shall have to visit me in Naboo.”

“Of course.”

You walk on, careful to keep the lantern stretched away from you and more towards the sand—you didn’t want to risk a wave crashing into your calf and then extinguishing the dwindling candle’s flame.

“Your knight is very kind, and sweet,” she says, and it seems like she’s thinking out loud more than anything. “He’s quite handsome, too.”

And for the first time, you don’t experience those once-unnamable feelings that you now understood as jealousy. It’s nothing at all like it was when the older girls in the kitchen were fawning over your knight so long ago.

In a mad and frenzied rush of trust, you want to tell Padmé about your visit with Sir Kenobi and what transpired before sunset.

But her wondering thoughts interrupt you. “He’s very witty,” she’s referring to the dinner party earlier.

“My father calls it sass, and ‘a bad influence’.” You kick another clump of wet sand. A seagull that’s stayed up late is crying sadly in the distance. You think of Frederick, and worry about Penelope. You haven’t seen her in so long—thought about her even less sometimes—and you had a strong feeling that she was now with Frederick. The thought was soothing. You thought of Obi-Wan’s letter about souls never really dying.

“You love him very much, don’t you?” Padmé’s face is open and earnest and you feel a strange tug in your chest that makes you want to tell her everything.

But you dance around her question. “I think he is my best friend. Before you, he was one of my only friends.”

“In a castle filled with people?” She asks as though you’re being preposterous, so you tell her about Fredericka and Sir Windu, and Perseus of course. And she tells you that she’s very to hear about Frederick, but very happy for you about Sir Windu and Perseus. And then. And then she tells you about _her_ knight: Lord Maul.

“Uncle says Lord Maul has been assigned to me ‘for my protection’; much like Sir Kenobi has been to you. But what we have is nothing like that at all.” You think briefly about the evolving relationship with Sir Kenobi, and how most ladies may not have what you both have at all, but you don’t say anything. “I think uncle has assigned Lord Maul to me for other reasons. To deter me from being more active with my education. I think he fears my inevitable reign.”

“Why would he be afraid of that? You are brilliant. He should feel proud and lucky to have you.  
  
“He wants a son. I’m his only heir and I know he doesn’t like that. He wants a son and Lord Maul is the closest thing he has to one. I’ve spoken with the handmaidens who have been in the rooms with uncle when the doctors have come to visit. There’s something inside of him that makes him unable to have children. I think. All these years, he’s spent his time blaming his wives. He is twice a widower, and they both died young. The doctors called it complications from trying to bear children for him. But I’ve never read anything like that in any of the medical books I’ve found in our library.”

You tell Padmé that you’ve spend some time reading medical books, too, and you’d never heard of anything like that. Perhaps you could ask Sir Obi about that, and see if he’s ever heard of anything like that in his travels. Padmé says that she would be interested in hearing his answer.

  
“I’m worried Uncle is interested in you in the worst way. And he thinks you can give him what you want.”

This makes you nervous. You want to talk more about it, but then you don’t want to speak of it ever again. Or hear her say anything like that ever again. So, instead, you say, “The candle is waning. We should return.”

\--

  
You make it to your bedroom door and Padmé is giggling and clutching at the back of your sleeping gown, rife with excitement. Apparently she’s not done much sneaking around on her own before, let alone with a friend, and her elation has kept you in good spirits.

“I can’t believe no one’s seen us!” Her whisper is a bit too loud, but it’s all right—you hadn’t run into anyone. “There must be fifty people in this castle. I thought we’d have seen at least one.”

But you know of one. And you know you’ll see him. And before he even speaks you, know he’s there. And you know he’s most likely _been_ there, lurking in the shadows ever since you snuck out the first time to go collect Padmé before your nighttime adventure.

“It is _SO_ late.” Sir Kenobi steps out of what you’ve come to understand his favorite shadow, or at least favorite corner to hide in. Padmé hides herself behind you out of embarrassment for being seen in her sleep clothes, or perhaps for seeing Sir Kenobi in his: untied front lace on his tunic; untied boots—you keep meaning to ask him how he manages to skulk around in the dark without them being tied: does he fall down often? But his lecturing is on fire, “What have I told you about sneaking out at night? And to drag poor, innocent, sweet Padmé into your shenanigans. I cannot believe you. This castle _IS_ full of people—probably _more_ than fifty—thank you Padmé, for that academic observation.” He sighs and looks at you, his eyes burning a stern aquamarine. “You told me that you’ve grown up since I left, but I see that isn’t so.”

Nobody says anything. Until Padmé lets go of your gown and says, “You sound very old when you speak like that.”

You try very hard to swallow your laugh.

Sir Kenobi is doing that thing where his eyelids all but disappear and he whispers fiercely. “GO TO SLEEP. Both of you. I don’t want to see you until morning.” He points his finger in your face, “Especially you.” But you just swat it away and he tries to swat at you, but you dodge him.

Padmé sleeps over in your room and she curls into you, giggling over how absurd Sir Kenobi looked in the dark—how can someone look so young and so old at the same time? She wonders. You don’t know, you tell her.

In the morning, Padmé braids your hair and watches over your shoulder while you spend your usual morning time sketching out markings and pathways for your first cartography project—you are mapping out what you believe to be Sir Kenobi’s journeys, but you don’t tell her that. Padmé talks about her ambitions and books she’s reading. It’s a lot. She wants to be a politician who actually does good. You tell her you believe in her and can’t wait to see her change the world. Padmé asks you what you want to do with your life. You don’t tell her that you never really thought of it. It has felt that your destiny was to be married to a man to help keep the peace between nation-states, so you just tried to learn as much as you could between now and then, and have as much fun as you could between now and then.

“You’re very good at this. These are better than the ones I’ve seen in atlases of the world.”

“Maybe I want to be a cartographer.”

Sir Kenobi announces through your front door, without knocking on it or opening it, that breakfast is ready and you roll your eyes at the door and you just know he’s rolling his back at it when he turns on his heel and leaves.

3

The grand dining table, usually occupied only by you, your father, and Sir Kenobi (when he wasn’t away) is just as full this morning at breakfast with the visitors here for the tournament as it was the night before for the massive feast. You wonder when people will start leaving already. You remembered previous tournaments how guests—sore losers, really—would leave once they were no longer in the tournament for poor performances or poor showmanship and sportsmanship.

Sir Kenobi takes his usual seat across from you. You feel like he’s being terse, that he’s still sore at you for dragging Padmé out of the castle the night before. But that didn’t seem right because he never stayed mad at you for long when you snuck out. He usually slept all of that unpleasantness off. But it looked like he hadn’t slept much at all—the lines around his eyes make him look tired, and the state of his rumpled hair tells you he must have tossed and turned all night and left himself in uncomfortable positions in bed.

He looks especially angry when Chancellor Palpatine asks Padmé to exchange seats with him so that he can sit next to you. And when he places his hand over yours, you understand the look on Sir Kenobi’s face: jealousy.

You are _intrigued._

You are so intrigued that you can’t even hear what the Chancellor is saying to you, it’s something like, “I do look forward to hearing more of your astute observations at today’s games in our court, Lady Organa.”

You kick Sir Kenobi’s boot from under the table and share a meaningful look with him. Sir Kenobi rolls his eyes at you when Palpatine begins speaking with someone else; you only smile down at your plate.   
  
When you sneak a glance across the table, you find Sir Kenobi staring down at his own plate with a satisfied smirk ghosting at the corner of his mouth.

4

On the final day of the games, Lord Maul and Sir Kenobi have earned the most points throughout the week, and are thrust into the final sparring match with one another. They face off in a knightly arming sword sparring match. They are not in their full armor, except at the shins and sleeves. The type of sparring this morning is not meant to wound or maim, but to earn points with blocking and striking. Striking must end in a touch on the other fellow’s body without intent to cut and slice. Lord Maul is once again in his dark obsidian and molten golden colors with his red manticore charge. Sir Kenobi seems to glow in his azure and astral, and again stands out without his animal charge.

Sir Kenobi’s trudges to the court’s table with his epee mask held at his side and he kneels before you and waits until you to meet him. His bowed head turns up at you when you greet him and he gifts you, again, with a single aster. You accept it, and the familiar statement from the announcer rings out one last time, “Lady Organa of the court gifts Sir Kenobi with a favor for the final game.” And there is again the expected applause. He stands and looks down at you and you wish him luck and lose your nerve after you wish to tell him how handsome and formidable he always looks in his sparring gear and then his face and hair disappear behind the epee mask.

He dedicates the performance to you, and then is met by Lord Maul, who again dedicates his performance to nobody and you fight the urge to glance at Padmé. You wonder if it bothers her that her knight has said nothing about her this entire time regardless of the way she feels about him.

The overcast afternoon grows grayer and you hope the rain holds off.

Sir Kenobi unsheathes his sword when the announcer tells he and Lord Maul to do so. Lord Maul is loose and ready on his feet, almost bouncing around and readying himself for something you’re sure will be theatric, if not gymnastic. Regardless of how you felt about him, he was indeed a graceful athlete in these games and it was very difficult to not admire his skills. He did especially well in the archery games the day before, breaking all records and even Sir Kenobi’s.

Sir Kenobi loosens up by twirling his wrist and therefore blade by his side in the way that always excited you very much. He always promised he would teach you how to do this. Someone wolf whistles him while he does this and you fight off a furious blush. Your father’s had is on your knee again and you cover it with yours. Of all the games, this one made you the most nervous and especially when thinking about his skilled opponent.

“Not to worry, my lady,” the Chancellor leans into, pushing your shoulder playfully with his own. You look at Sir Kenobi when this happens, hoping he sees how exasperated you feel. He drops his sword and your brow furrows. “My Lord Maul will leave your knight in one piece,” Chancellor Palpatine continues. “I promise.”

You had so many ways you wanted to retort that you were most certainly NOT his lady; that Sir Kenobi will surely win this game; and that you never wanted to be promised anything by him. Your father seemed to sense this, and his fingers squeeze into your leg in a warning that said: hold your tongue, my dear.

And he answers for you in his fake and good humored chuckle, “I’m sure the Lady is glad to know, Chancellor.”

The two knights spar. And its impressive the way they seem to fly around each other and clear the other’s blade any time it swings low as though to take out shins and ankles. At one point Lord Maul gracefully arches his sword in a way that Sir Kenobi simply cannot avoid and his face is met by the blade. He drops his own sword and falls to his knees, tearing his epee off over his head, his hair damp and glowing redder than ever and he clutches at his cheek where the skin has broken and is bleeding.

And Sir Kenobi concedes.

5

The evening after the match brings the grand leaving feast. Lord Maul is celebrated as the victor, and Sir Kenobi smiles generously. But you wonder if his pride is also wounded, like his face. It healed, but the cut struck him near his beauty mark and when you saw how long the line was, you secretly fretted over the possibility that he could have been poked in the eye and more seriously injured. The strike was, of course, categorized as accidental.

Chancellor Palpatine has once again claimed a seat next to you and when more glasses of wine are being filled, he tries to be covert like always next to you (which he must have thought charming because of how often he tried but you found his attempts and himself simply grotesque, if not ludicrous). This time when everyone is a bit silly off their wine and clamoring for a refill, his hand dips under the table to touch your leg. Your heart shoots up into your throat and you jerk away violently, spilling your merlot all over your side of the table. You accidentally kick Sir Kenobi from under the table and he sees that the Chancellor has done something to upset you.

And breaks his drinking glass in his hand. Everyone stops chattering, but continues drinking, and only stares at your end of the table.

The Chancellor tries to soothe you but also play off his advances as though they didn’t happen and as though you’ve been startled by something else entirely, covering your hand with his damp one. You swat Chancellor Palpatine’s hand away and rush over to Sir Kenobi who is telling everyone he’s fine while making his exit and that he will return once he’s cleaned up. You lead him to the kitchens because that’s closest, and he perches himself upon the counter that you and the older girls use to prepare your baking in. You stand in between his spread legs, and grab his bleeding hand, cradling it gently and squinting at the wound. You gingerly pick the glass out, laying it on the counter but away from him, and you clean the wound. He hisses, and you shush him in a way that he finds comforting and he does quiet. The wound is not deep and the bleeding stops, but you don’t stop holding his hand. And then you kiss his wound, and then you just stare at one another, and that’s when Padmé walks in to see if Sir Kenobi is okay and to see if you need help. Padmé has seen the kiss and you think back to you and her’s walk down the beach a couple of nights ago when she asked you if you loved your knight. And you hadn’t answered. But the look she gives you, especially when you haven’t dropped Sir Kenobi’s hand, and especially when you don’t jump backwards and away from him, she knows. Immediately. About everything you feel about him, but refuse to say. And she is non-judgmental. And you love her for that. And when the three of you in the kitchen look at each other, you all know that Padmé will keep this to herself. 

6

You’re furious by the time dinner ends and you’re furious that Sir Kenobi has been injured one too many times since your sordid guests arrived. You steal away to your bedroom immediately after goodbyes are exchanges—everyone will be leaving at the break of dawn. The only one whose absence you will mourn is of course Padmé’s and she of course promises to write you all the time. Sir Kenobi is stoic when everyone is shaking hands to say goodbye, and when Chancellor Palpatine saves you for last (which boils your guts), Sir Kenobi uses his body as a shield and steps in front of you.

You see your father’s brow crease and he gives his fake politician’s life. “Obi-Wan, the Chancellor wishes to say goodbye to the Lady of the House.”

But Sir Kenobi seems to not hear this, and his eyes are burning into the Chancellor’s. They stare each other down as though they’re the only ones in the room. The Chancellor smoothes his stark white hair back with a hand and you wonder if his palm is still as greasy as it was when he touched yours earlier.

The Chancellor gives his own oily, fake politicians laugh and jokes, “What can you do? The boy is very protective of his charge. It is admirable. But perhaps too long in the tooth at this age.”

Sir Kenobi’s face is kind but stern and you can tell he’s irate and unnerved. “Your Lord Maul is very impressive; you must be very proud.”

The Chancellor is taken aback by this comment like he didn’t expect it. “He’s been very well trained since he was a boy. You should feel honored to consider him a rival.”

“Has he ever spent his travels abroad? Perhaps doing any kind of work with the Trade Federation or the Separatists?”

You see your father flinch. Sir Kenobi’s severity will not subside and you admire him when he is stern like this with someone he needs information from. You can see the wheels turning in his head—has the Chancellor and his Lord’s behavior and seemingly propensity for cruelty inspired Sir Kenobi to think them somehow involved with that phantom figure he mentioned in his letter to your father?

But the Chancellor says nothing. He doesn’t address this. But you know he’s thinking.

The Chancellor’s finally laughs, and his body grows rigid with impatience, and you don’t care at all for the almost-dead look in his eyes. “Step aside, Obi-Wan.” And you _really_ don’t care at all with the harsh, grating change in his voice and the strange strangled turn it takes when addressing your knight by his true name. “The lady?”

Sir Kenobi turns to face you, still shielding you from the Chancellor with his back to him. He looks down at you searching your face, his eyelashes fluttering, as though blinking some kind of communication from behind his startlingly bright eyes, and you give him a discreet nod. Sir Kenobi steps away, but posts up right behind your shoulder, his front almost pressing into you. His presence and weight behind you makes you feel as sheltered as he did when he was in front of you.

The Chancellor leans down to kiss your cheek, and he smells like wine and mead and he tells you that he plans to visit you again very soon. “With less company,” his words are laced with a promise that you don’t like, especially because he eyes Sir Kenobi once more with those final words. Sir Kenobi’s hand falls to your shoulder, and the Chancellor’s discreet sneer at the touch is missed by everyone in the room but you and your knight.

\--

Sometime before sunset, you are working on your cartography project and just how Sir Kenobi would sometimes burst into your room without even thinking, he enters your room just like that in this moment. He startles you and you spill your ink over a rubbish piece of parchment that you made mistakes on and you swear under your breath. You are in your night clothes already, knowing that you had no desire whatsoever to leave your room this evening. What a day.

He doesn’t say anything at first and only watches you working on your project at your desk. You feel a draft and wrap your night gown around you closer still, this thin silk making you want to grab the cloak on your bed. You watch his eyes flit over your silhouette in all of the glowing candlelight. You feel like it seems to burn through your sleeping gown’s fabric. He’s in his tunic, and its untied, and you stare at the bare parts of his chest that you can see, reeling over the colors of the golden-red hairs there; and the way the fabric clings against his more filled-out form; and his more obvious muscles—so unlike when he was younger.

And you just look at each other until he breaks the silence with an awkward smile. “I apologize, my lady. I must have forgotten that you are grown, and that you deserve privacy. Not that you never deserved it before. I shall not enter without knocking for permission. Please forgive me.”

You hum in agreement. “Yes, I am no longer that twelve-year-old girl cursing in a stolen hand mirror.” You dab at the spilled ink and smile softly at him. “You are forgiven, Sir Obi.”

He looks down, embarrassed at the old nickname, and chooses to address the former part of your response. “Ah, so you finally admit that you stole poor Adelaide’s mirror all those years ago.”

“I thought I told you that I’ve matured quite a bit since you’ve been away.”

“Perhaps the world is coming to an end—I never thought I would hear you admit to any wrongdoing at all.” He leans against your door frame, and crosses his arms across his chest.

“Don’t be overly dramatic—we shall simply call it a paradigm shift.”

“Of course, of course.” His hand goes into his hair and he pushes it back and you stare at the hairs on his wrist poking out from under his tunic’s sleeve. That hand then reaches into his tunic and he shows you the piece of lapis lazuli from your necklace. “I wanted to return your favor now that the games are over. I am sorry that I failed you this year. It is my fault—my pride and ego convinced me that I could not be bested.”

You get up from your desk and meet him at the threshold between your bedroom door and the antechamber just beyond it. You notice that your hands are smudged with ink and you wonder if he finds that childish. Instead you find him looking down at them with some kind of fondness.

“It is very interesting that of all the things, you chose to latch onto cartography.”

“I’m trying to map out your adventures from the past two years,” your eyes shine earnestly, and his soften at this and the look that he gives you absolutely cannot be called anything but affection. “I’m looking forward to showing you the final version. I’ve made so many mistakes.”

“As we all do. I look forward to you showing me.”

You look at one another a moment longer and he doesn’t break his gaze while he takes your necklace off. And he doesn’t speak when he steps just a little bit closer to you to place it around your neck while you’re still facing him. The lapis lazuli is warm against your bare chest, and you flush with the thought of him having worn it all day.

He clears his throat and looks out the window, as though measuring the minutes left in the light. “Have a good night, my little one. Don’t stay up too late.”

But you know you’ll stay up very late. There was too much to think about, and your room didn’t feel big enough to hold all of these thoughts. After he left, you examined the sun’s position in the sky, too, and determined there was still yet enough time in the day to steal away by yourself into the woods to think there.

7

You’d wanted to show Sir Kenobi the somewhat impressive lean-to, or fort, that you’d build while he was away. The one that you joked about in your letter that told him you destroyed the castle, and lived in the grotto now. But with the tournament going on and him spending time catching up with you in the castle, and visiting with everyone else, and resting in between the tournament’s games, you could never find the right time. He just seemed to disappear at times, always around sunset after dinner. You’d gotten bored sitting up and waiting for him to visit you at these times, and got used to his goodnight visits happening later into the evening, well after sunset. So, you’d decided to spend time in your fort with what sunlight was left in the evening—you’d taken the crooked nail he poorly smithed and sent to you in response to your grotto joke and nailed it into the fort, and hung his leather satchel full of his memories and letters. Sometimes you wandered out here to hide from everyone and read them when you were feeling especially alone and knew that you wouldn’t see Sir Kenobi for a while still.

As you settled into one of the fort’s posts, an unopened memory in your lap, you hear the snap of a twig. You stuff your letter back into the satchel and hold your breath and still yourself. Perhaps its just Arcade and Adelaide coming out here to kiss and fool around—it wouldn’t be the first time you witnessed that out here in the woods. But even then, you were certain that almost nobody else knew the grotto even _existed_ —it was deeper into the woods than many others were willing to venture into.

In your stillness and quiet breathing, the person that you find come upon the water is actually Sir Kenobi. You frown, actually annoyed that he’s encroaching on your secret place. But he’s really more adjacent to you and he crouches a bit to stick his hand in the water all the way up to his wrist, testing the temperature. He pulls his hand back and shakes it out to air dry it. You wonder if he’s come looking for you and you quietly move to push yourself into a standing position, but at this moment, he’s untying the front laces of his tunic and you still yourself, opting instead to lay on your front and “army crawl” closer to your side of the bank of water, watching him from around the bushes.

He looks around, his soft hair moving around with his gaze, and he crosses his arms and peels his shirt off, letting it drop to the ground next to him. His boots follow after. You absolutely freeze. He’s stretching and he’s also turned his back to you and you see the muscles in his back and shoulders work in the stretch and your gasp is silent. Your mouth has gone very dry, but you also feel like you could be drooling. You count three moles on his back, and several freckles across his shoulder blades. His back is smooth and pale, unlike his slightly tanned face that you spent way too much time thinking about since he’s returned. He pushes his hair back with both hands and your eyes widen at seeing the muscles in his arm, and the soft stretch of his belly. He drops his hands, and his fingers go to fiddle with opening his trousers and you almost theatrically and perhaps a big too melodramatically shield your eyes, feeling like you’ve breached his trust by seeing so much already.

You don’t open your eyes until you hear the sound of him breaking the water as he wades into the small pond that the waterfall a few meters away empties out into. When you open your eyes, you don’t see him until he comes up for air and pushes his hair back again in the very same way as before, except it’s now fully wet. And you feel fully wet, too. But you would worry about that later because right now, he’s swimming around in whatever room the pond allotted, and you are semi-distracted with wondering how deep it is; and wondering why he’s never gone swimming in the ocean with you; and wondering why—

But after a few short laps, he’s come to a shallow end and is standing and you see his backside and you feel as though you should close your eyes again but you just really cannot.

  
He pushes himself backward onto the nearby bank, legs still shin deep in the water. You marvel at the crease where his stomach meets his hip and the way he moves when he draws one of his legs out of the water, knee tucked toward his shoulder and he rests his arm across the top of it and rests his cheek on the top of his forearm. You remember all the times he’s folded himself into the armchair next to your bed and flush with excitement now knowing what he looks like under his clothes when he sits in certain ways.

You crawl as close as you can get without being spotted, and adjust the cloaks hood around your hair, hoping that the brown keeps you well camouflaged behind the bushes and other greenery and woods. Youve never seen a man like this before, even in illustrations from your fathers medical textbooks that you stole moments with to learn everything you could about bodies that didn’t belong to you but no amount of studying could have prepared you for the way obiwans collarbones jut ever so slightly out, nor the freckles peppered over his shoulders, and the hard muscles in his biceps. The hair all along his forearms. You wonder what the damp ones feel like across his cheek not covered in wet whiskers.

He rubs at his eye with his free hand’s fist and then hugs his knee closer to his chest. His other leg, the one stretched out and still half submerged. Is paler than the tanned skin on his forearms and face, and the muscles there aren’t as well define as the ones in his arms. “ _He’s so good at sparring because of those muscles_ ,” you think, and you flush with the image of him holding himself above _you,_ holding all of his weight on his strong arms, and your hips press into the mound of ground you’re poised over, not to move closer, but because. Well you couldn’t quite figure it out. Because your hips felt like it? And the pressure felt nice against that boiling flame in your lower belly that made your stomach hurt when you saw Obi-Wan do certain things.

Your eyes move from his thigh and up, and what’s nestled between his legs and you press yourself harder in the ground. Weeks before he’d returned home, you finally pieced together what a eunuch was: from reading tales about monks in far away places; from better-understanding the gossiping older girls; from Aracade’s bold stupidity and the elevation in his obscene language as you rapidly aged into young adulthood. And you lay in your bed that night, once all of these puzzle pieces came together, in a stupor or shocking revelation of sorts, realizing that Obi-Wan was not whole. That he was not a complete man. That he did not have the _parts_ that made him a man.

You’d rolled over to your side and curled into yourself, hugging his cloak to your chest and middle. But Obi-Wan _WAS_ a man, you reasoned. He was brave and chivalrous. And kind. And funny. And smart, and a great storyteller. All of the things that made him so wonderful to you, and the way he made you feel like the only person in his world, were more important than anything physical that he could be missing. His heart, hard and soft at all the right times; his wit, clever and sweet when it needed to be; and his loyalty, unyielding and always present even in his absence.

Yes, you’d resolved that night, you would _always_ love Obi-Wan. You would love Obi-Wan until you could no longer _feel_ such an emotion. You would love Obi-Wan _forever_ , and with your whole heart, even if he was not whole himself.

You press your fingers into the grass beside you and will your fingers to understand the sensation to feel like his hair that you touched what feels like too long ago as you look at the thing between his legs and the beautiful tufts of hair above it. The hair, red and golden, like his whiskers, and you wonder if they are as coarse as the ones on his face and wonder that they would feel like under your touch, what it would feel like to spread your fingers out at his mound, much like you did upon his scruffy cheek.

Your hips wonder too because they’re grinding into the ground again and your hand grips at the grass, even pulling some loose in this new-fangled desperation. The heat will either swallow you alive or burn up your lungs before you could find any relieving remedy for it. Obiwan’s other leg draws out of the water and he sits cross-legged like you’ve always seen him do and everything is the same but different now.

He closes his eyes and you wonder if he’s going to start meditating but instead his hands move to his thighs. One squeezes tightly towards the inner part and he lets out the sweetest sounding groan, allowing his jaw to fall open just a bit and you feel a gushing roiling heat when you see his tongue touch his bottom lip. You remember how that very lip traced a line of wordless declarations about how much he missed you while you were away, and you feel an instinctual urge to whine and immediate frustration upon realizing that you simply cannot. He cannot see you.

Extraordinarily, when your eyes rove over his body once more, the member between his legs was no longer soft and resting against his inner thigh, but stiff and standing as if alert, and his hand moved from his thigh to the underside of his....his...“cock,” you remember hearing the older girls say before and the flush in you in dangerous and your fingers dig into the dirt as you watch Obi-Wan caress the underside of his cock first up and down the length and then slowly side to side of its width and you bite your lip when his fingers finally wrap around it at the base.

It looks heavy in his hand and this thrills you. Even more thrilling is thinking of how his hand masterfully wrapped around his blade’s hilt in games and practice and your heart races wondering how he masterfully handles his. His hand slides up and stops at the tip of his cock and he tugs at it gently, leaning his head back, throat flexing and working out the most beautiful strangled sounds you’d ever heard come from another person. His hair reaches his shoulder blades in his move, and he goes to lay down, pressing all of his weight into his left arm. His right palm runs flat over the tip of his cock and when he draws it away you can see a glimmering line of something stretch from his tip to his palm and is soon gone as his fist is around his beautiful length once more and he begins a rhythm groaning softly and desperately, sometimes twisting his wrist in a way that made one of his legs tremble.

He lets out a sharp gasp as though something is about to happen, and he lets go of his cock and his hand instead roves over to his middle and you can’t get over how soft his stomach looks in comparison to his strong upper arms, nor his shallow and desperate panting that begins to abate as he calms himself with these gentle caresses, fingers tracing up, following the trail of hair that bridges the landscape between his mound and chest, past the ridge of his ribcage and into the wisps of hair at his chest.

His hand rests there and his breathing has calmed but his cock has not, and you gaze at it, hard and shining in the dwindling sunlight. And you gaze at what your fathers textbook illustrations had labeled as ‘testes’ but you wrinkle your nose at such a crude and clinical sounding word (arcades were far more obscene) for something that looked so delicate: a soft pouch of skin that looked so flushed and taut and holding a pair of stones that you are moved to want to cup in your hands and feel their weight and shape.

And as Obi-Wan takes himself in his hand once more and cries out, his left arm giving out and he collapses on his back to continue his ministrations now more frantic, one of his legs drawing up and you see how his strokes are moving the sack between his legs and you hear the first crude curse word ever to fall from his lips, a ragged “ _fuck_ ,” drawn out from somewhere deep in his stomach and then and then. Your name tumbling from his lips like a prayer nobody should hear, and the only other word that isn’t said but finally makes sense to you—and _finally_ identifies the heat licking from behind your own mound that is pressed even more hopelessly harder into the ground—is **_desire_**.

And there’s some great welling of anguished tension in you, and you feel the sting of tears prick at your eyes and your fingers are a mess in the earth beside you and you must stifle your cry in your arm. The sound is swallowed by an alluring mewling sound coming from Obi-Wan that is followed by your name again and you respond to this call with a soft but audible, “ _Obi-Wan_ ,” a sigh and a gasp and a promise. This is the first time you’ve uttered it aloud in full, and the feel of it forming in your head and exiting your body is too much, and a tight thrumming wavers over you. And he must feel it, too, because his attention is not only turned towards your direction now, but he answers with soft “ _yes_ ” that makes you feel righteous. And the heat inside of you tears open into the night, and his name falls from your lips punctuating the tapering feeling of this brief fluttering, and he’s spilling into his hand with a whine that you are envious of: a whine you want to capture in your mouth or feel him hum against your neck beaded with sweat. A whine you want to respond to his call with.

When the beautiful sounds he’s making ebb away in the newly falling near-darkness, you want to rush to him and wrap him in the cloak with you and pull him into you and let him rest until you both fall asleep with your fingers still curled into his hair from soothing him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader and our dear Sir Kenobi suffer the suitors; suffer through the pangs of their developing and intense feelings for one another; suffer fights with one another and others; and make certain declarations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: 18+! Explicit! Smit! Mature! I was feral writing this!  
> Warnings: Mentions of murder; angst; smut; emotional fingerbanging.  
> Note: This is over 10,000 words! Sorry for typos!

—

1

When you are almost finished with being nineteen, potential suitors have come and gone and were always sent away. There had been boys—younger than Sir Kenobi was when he first came into your life; there had been men—far older and grayer than your father. Most times, you would ask your knight to escort them away from you and send them off the grounds; other times, he didn’t have to be requested this, and would advise you to send them away before they stayed around long enough to sit at dinner with you and your father.

This behavior and these rash (in his opinion, anyway) decisions leave your father fretting and pacing in his political chambers; pacing outside of your bedroom’s antechamber; pacing around the dinner table. His worried and harried footsteps were always matched with words that bemoaned his dissatisfaction with your choices, and pleaded with you to understand that you could not maintain this behavior. That you could not be so dismissive, and that you would truly have to grow up one day and if you didn’t realize it sooner rather than later, you would be totally swept off your feet when reality came crashing around you.

Sir Kenobi tried his best to mediate these interactions and assuage you both, but failed far more frequently than he succeeded. You just tried to convince yourself that you and your father were simply going through another rough time together.

Your father has even had fits and tirades in the parlor, which is where he, you, and Sir Kenobi would spend time together in the evenings after dinner. These were supposed to be times of peace, and times where nobody had to think about the harsh realities that came crashing out of the sky that your father fretted over far too often.

Most of these visits involved the three of you spread out across and all over the room while the fireplace was lit by one of the men, and you would read aloud from a book to them, or the three of you would be consumed in your own projects. Sometimes you would craft; sometimes you would drag your cartography materials out and sketch mindlessly and idly while your father would flick through law books and frown at them, and Sir Kenobi would read or work on his own crafts. He was quite talented at woodworking, and would craft small animals for you and your father to perch on your desks. Sometimes he would sit in such ludicrous positions while working on these, folded all over himself and bent over whatever he was toying with in his lap, shaking his head every few minutes in an attempt to fling his hair out of his face where it falls into the line of his vision.

After being annoyed with this sight for far too long, you’d decided to do something about it and began bringing ribbons with you in the evenings even if you didn’t intend on crafting. Before the evening projects and before your father would join you both in the parlor, you would assume a kneeling position behind Sir Kenobi after he’d ignited the fireplace, and card your fingers through his hair, marveling over how much longer and thicker it seemed to grow every day. Your fingers in his hair were almost always more exploratory and lingered much longer than necessary—this was never any simple grooming; it was always a careful study that involved all of the touches that you would think about wanting to give him throughout most of the day. The pads of your fingers from one hand would rest at the base of his neck and would move upward until they disappeared into his scalp, and rake outwards, brushing through his soft locks towards you without a comb at all, and watch the strands fall softly back into place, catching in the firelight: the ambers, the reds, the honeyed blondes, and the grays.

You would comb all of his hair back with your fingers and he would lean back into you until his shoulders rested against your front and you would shift to sitting on your rear and spread your legs wide enough for him to scoot back into you, almost resting his back into you. And you would gently gather up all of his hair into one hand, and reach for the ribbon with the other. You would ask him for his hand to hold his bundle of hair for you and sometimes his fingers would ghost over yours in these moments and linger while you pretended to struggle with the ribbon in your other hand. And he would take his bundle from you and hold onto it while you tied the ribbon around it with shaking fingers. He almost always requested you tie the ribbon into a bow, which you would with an amused smile. You would move from him, and he would catch your fingers in his hand and look at you with such an intensity with his burning cerulean gaze that you thought he might kiss your hand. But he never did, and this left your fingers burning into the night. The bows were always tight and taut by the time your father entered the room, and you would already be perched on the sofa across from Sir Kenobi’s place in the floor in front of the fireplace, gazing at his face and profile, and wondering—never for the first time at all—what he would look like now with shorter hair now that his face has matured with scruff.

When your father comes into the parlor this evening, you think that the talk of suitors has calmed for a while. It has been a few days since the most recent one left—he was nice enough, but what you would describe as…elementary. He seemed to have no interests of his own, oftentimes echoing his own father’s opinions and interests. He had been young—just turned twenty, like you would be in a few days, but seemed much younger still. He had been pretty, but vapid, and still looked very much like a boy.

“Darling, you must select one to court you.” Your father brings this up once again, and you just don’t want to hear it and you know Sir Kenobi doesn’t, either. He’s just as exhausted as you are and you never thought that you would spend so much time in your life talking about boys and men, and judging them sometimes humorously and sometimes cruelly with your knight. You’d both grown frustrated spending your time with these visitors and then assessing them in the back ends of the evenings, which this time used to be spent together talking about books and telling funny stories about Frederick, or Sir Windu and Perseus.

You are broken out of your thoughts when your father won’t relent, “We simply cannot go through every man in the galaxy.”

You raise your eyebrow at him in a way that he _simply cannot_ stand—the movement is laced with a teasing, ‘ _Would you care to bet, Father?_ ’.

He cuts a glare towards your knight who is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the active fireplace and innocently carving at a piece of wood, fashioning it into another small animal: this time, a mallard. On your walks around the grounds in the mornings, he always kept an eye out for the ducks. For whatever reason, he was almost always tickled by the ducks, thinking them ‘funny’, and even though you saw them on these walks, too, he would still point them out at you, ‘Look at the way they walk!’ he would exclaim, and stare with wide eyes, smiling with almost all of his teeth showing, and looking very much like the young man you met so long ago.

But tonight, he looks… _aged_. Old. Older than usual. And just… _so_ tired. His tunic is untied, and you admire the way the firelight brightens up the visible hairs on his chest. The sleeves are rolled up and you feel smitten over the way his forearms move and flex with the work his hands are doing. It isn’t often that you see his arms bare like this, and you spend far too long gazing, marveling over the amount of hair there, all the way to his wrists, and the delicate ones sprinkled over the backs of his hands. The golden red colors are lighter than the ones at his chest, and the slight freckling near his wrists and fingers makes your stomach hurt almost as much as the mark on his face does. 

His hair is tied back with a frilly, purple ribbon tonight and with the lack of fringe falling into his eyes, you can see the lines in his forehead strain and shift while he squints at his meticulous work. He looks up from his carving when the room goes quiet, and catches your father glaring down at him. Sir Kenobi widens his eyes in a blameless and clueless way as he looks up at him from under his long eyelashes. “Yes, my Lord?” He brushes the wood peelings off of his lap with a gentle snap of his wrist, and drags a knuckle up to his nose to skim an itch away.

Your father sighs too dramatically—you’ve told him how melodramatic he can be at times, and he’s only told you it’s because you are worrying him to an early grave; the irony was missed on him with this declaration—and he waves a tired arm in your direction where you’re curled up in your night clothes with a book open face down over your leg. “The insolence you’ve taught her has done nothing to improve the situation.”

Sir Kenobi glance at you from across the room and gives you a stern look. “What have I told you about using your eyes for good only?”  
  
Your father’s attentions are turned towards staring into the crackling fire. You roll your eyes at your knight and he rolls his back.  
  
There is silence in the room once more, and you don’t go back to your book, and Sir Kenobi just holds onto his unfinished carving dumbly until your father speaks again, “You cannot wait for a perfect man; they don’t exist.”

His tone has softened, indicating that he feels sorry for you and trying to convey that he can somewhat understand what your problem is. But its still laced with an unspoken sentiment that you’ve been feeling drift out of his exasperated body that floats into your own and fills your lungs with a disappointing question that he would never ask: _why can’t you behave the way that I want you to?_ His fingers stroke at the graying whiskers on his face.  
  
Your eyes flicker over to Sir Kenobi who has ceased his carving and has pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them. An inexplicable and indescribable heaving always filled your chest when you saw him make himself small like this. He looked like a child in these moments, even with the ridiculous purple bow in his hair.

  
Sir Kenobi breaks the silence, “She should be granted the opportunity to weigh all her options.”  
  
Your father sighs, and uncrosses his arms, and he presses his palm into Sir Kenobi’s forehead. “Obi-Wan, please.” This is the way that he usually shushes the younger man, and it always worked.  
  
Sir Kenobi quiets and rests his cheek at his knees and looks over at you where you have mirrored his position.  
  
Your father sighs once more before saying in a tight-lipped way, “The next man who visits, you will give him a chance. For more than a day. If he is to stay with us, you will be cordial, and be interested even if you are not.”  
  
You look at Sir Kenobi, who nods, but with the familiar line of deep thought etched in between his brow. Your father sees you nod your consent after feeling your knight’s against his palm.

“At least I can always trust Sir Kenobi to guide you towards doing what is right and decent.”  
  
—  
  


You are twenty when the next suitor comes, and he stays for almost a week. Much like Arcade, he is the worst. And you’re worried that they may be related in some way because not only do they get along so well, but the older girls lose their collective minds over him and screech over how excited they are that someone so witty (he’s not) and handsome (he’s all right) has taken such a keen interest in you (barf). Before, it was easier to weasel your way out of these meetings because you still had designated hours for lessons before your preliminary education came to an end. It was even easier still, because once Sir Kenobi got sick of being around these guys just as you were, he would yell at them that their time was up and he would fabricate a lesson that you had to get to.

You wished that were the case now. Instead, you were stuck with this guy for the rest of the afternoon.

He takes you on walks all over your grounds, and Sir Kenobi is never far away. And neither is his scowl or grumpiness. He is your permanent chaperone, and this suitor does not like that at all, and spends much of your promenade around the training field trying to lure you into the woods. You think of the grotto and your lean-to, and are filled with a brief moment of possessive madness, that you all but drag him away from the forest edge. Sir Kenobi uncrosses his arms and jogs to catch up with the two of you, and keep a closer watch.

When the boy marvels at your father’s army practicing archery, you pretend to be interested in his past and ask if he’s ever served in _his_ father’s army. He hasn’t. You sneak a glance at Sir Kenobi who rolls his eyes at you, and you roll yours back.

One of the soldiers from the far side of the field shouts out something about a rogue arrow, and the potential suitor cowers behind you. But Sir Kenobi, ever skilled in his keen sense of foresight, is by your side in a flash and tugs you out of harms way by your upper arm, and curls you into his chest, shielding you from any potential danger. When the arrow lands some ten feet away, he pulls away from you and searches your face until you tell him that you’re okay.

The suitor is still on the ground, protecting the back of his head with his hands.

The boy leaves in the morning, and tells you that he is looking forward to your letters.

You almost tell him that you are illiterate.

—

  
“You cannot see him any longer.” Obi-Wan says the next morning when he’s come to fetch you from your rooms before the sun is fully in the sky. He is grumpy and still filled with sleep. His hair is fluffy and tucked behind his ears the best he can, and his tunic is rumpled like he’s tossed and turned all night. When he offers his arm for you to slide yours into, you lean just a bit too close and try to capture his lingering sleep-warmth. A strong scent of peppermint and lavender oils clouds your head—he’s been using far too much of both in an attempt to stay drowsy in the evening, only for it to not work so well.  
  
You’d had a prospective suitor come stay in the castle for the past week. You hadn’t cared much for him. Obi-Wan didn’t like him at all.  
  
It is early, and you sometimes walk with your knight to the kitchens well before everyone else gets up, and well before the older girls come in to prepare breakfast for everyone else in the castle. You perch yourself upon the counter, much like he was a few nights ago when you were picking glass out of his cut hand. Obi-Wan is next to you, leaning his back into the counter’s lip, and peeling an apple with a sharp knife. You worry that it will slip, and he will cut himself, but you don’t say anything.  
  
“Why not?” You have no interest in and every intention not to see the man (or boy) who came calling a few days ago.  
  
“Besides letting you almost be pierced by an arrow?” He’s finished slicing the apple and pitches the core. The peeled slices (exactly how you like them) sit on the clean counter in a juicy heap, and he stabs one with his knife. He stands in front of you, again: much like you did with him the other night when cleaning out his hand, and he holds it in front of your mouth with a quirked eyebrow offering the fruit to you. “Why not?” He echoes you—like always—and watches you take the fruit not with your hand (which he blinks in surprise over and it greatly amuses you), but straight up biting into it carefully and chewing it thoughtfully, waiting for him to continue while he stabs at the other pieces. “He was tragically born without a personality, wasn’t he?”  
  
“How incredibly sardonic. Even for you.” You steal a slice away from him before he can chop it in half and he gives you a stern look, and mumbles something about ‘you need to be more patient, little one.’  
  
He stabs his own slice and is chewing on it while he’s preparing your next one. “Is it?”  
  
“Cruel even.”  
  
“Your mean old knight, then.”  
  
“Who never lets me do anything.”  
  
His other eyebrow is quirked when his attentions are turned upon you, offering another slice by blade. “Never, ever.” He briefly runs the pad of his thumb over your chin after you take this slice, and suddenly you are no longer hungry.

He finishes the apple before you both hear the older girls’ voices wavering out from their chambers, and he follows you out of the kitchens, and promises that he will tell your father the cancellation of the latest potential suitor was of his own counsel.  
  
  
  


2

You are well into your twentieth year when the suitors stop for a while, and you are almost hopeful that this whole business will blow away and was never as serious as your father made it out to be. Since meeting her, you wrote to Padme often: you both wrote to each other so often that your letters overlapped one another, addressing new events and topics before the other even had a chance to respond to the letter that came before. You confided everything in Padme, and it was so good to have a girl friend who truly understood you without you having to overexplain yourself. And it was so good to have a confidant outside of your own castle walls—a sentiment she reminded you of constantly in her post scripts.

One of her latest:

  
_My dearest friend,_

_I know you never asked me to listen in on anything within these walls, but wouldn’t be able to relinquish this guilt if I didn’t tell you what I overheard when I was in the library. Uncle had a visitor this week; Viceroy Gunray of Neimodia. I couldn’t quite hear all of the conversation, but uncle was terribly upset overhearing the Viceroy’s retelling of your knight’s business there some months ago when he was out on negotiations on your father’s behalf. Viceroy Gunray said that Sir Kenobi and General Jinn ruthlessly slaughtered his two top-ranked admirals during what was supposed to be a peaceful diplomatic conversation. The viceroy claimed that your knight attacked when the Viceroy expressed his deep dissatisfaction and disapproval of Uncle participating in the annual games with your ‘cruel’ father. Here is what is interesting: Uncle claims that he only participated in the games because he heard from some reliable sources that your Sir Kenobi would make it home in time to participate. Uncle said that he wanted to participate only to gauge Sir Kenobi skills against Lord Maul’s. Yes, my knight was present during this conversation. And no, he said nothing—you know he speaks infrequently, if at all. They noted, briefly, your relationship with your knight. Neither care for it at all and the Viceroy confessed he’s heard from other nation states who wish to send eligible bachelors to meet with you and Lord Organa that they also do not care for your relationship. Uncle said something particularly cruel that surprised me. It seems he holds less of a filter or sensor the more he ages, but perhaps this is how he speaks behind closed doors. I wouldn’t think he would speak like this in front of Lord Organa; I do believe your father intolerant of such sentiments. Uncle is going to send a request and RSVP to your father for a preliminary week-long visit to test the waters with courting you—I believe he wants much more. Viceroy Gunray says that he is sending his own RSVP and is bringing his “top man” with him._

_Keep Obi-Wan Kenobi close—I am worried._

_Love always, Padme_

_P.S. Uncle treats your relationship with Sir Kenobi as something childish and no longer necessary. And he speaks Sir Kenobi as though he’s your pet. “Let the boy be in love with her. It’s not as if there’s anything the cockless bastard can do about it.”_

  
  
  
  


3

With a break from visitors and suitors for the next couple of years (your father frets that you have literally scared everyone away, and you try very hard to tell him that there are plenty of men in the galaxy), you and Sir Kenobi fall back into the familiar night time visits before he orders you to go to sleep and stay out of trouble. You remind him that you are more than half-way through your twenty-second year at this point, and he doesn’t need to tell you the things he used to ten years ago now. He lectures you that he most certainly does. He usually curls up in the armchair next to your bed and reads from a book while you sit with your legs crossed in the chair at your desk, finishing up last minute tweaks at your latest cartography project. Instead, tonight you are cleaning out the nibs of your quills—they have gotten clogged in recent sketching sessions. Sometimes you were neglectful of flushing them out. Sir Kenobi has dragged his armchair over at your desk and watches you with the attentiveness of a gentle wolf, his eyes bright and wavering around at all of the instruments strewn across your desk.

You tell him about the letter from Padme, but not about everything in the letter: especially the stuff about him, and that postscript with the particularly cruel comment uttered by her uncle. You only tell him about her uncle making her nervous with his seemingly close friendship with the Viceroy of the Trade Federation, and her warnings about the forthcoming RSVPs.

Sir Kenobi is very thoughtful listening about this seemingly unlikely friendship between the Chancellor and Viceroy, and he tells you he will reach out to his old mentor, General Jinn, about this to see if he knows anything more on the matter. You thought _for sure_ that your knight would bring up the things that you read about in his letter to your father, or bring up something to do with the negotiations gone wrong (ending in “slaughter”, which again and again becomes your least-favorite word) that Padme alluded to in her letter. But he doesn’t.

“As for the RSVPs,” he says, stroking at his stubble thoughtfully with his fingers, “we shall meet them when they come. Try to remain calm and rested until we must see them.”

“Please don’t tell me to meditate.” You offer a small chuckle to break the tension that’s filled the room from the dread that you know will creep back in waves. You wonder if he feels those waves from time to time, too.

His smile is mischievous, and tired. “I will not.” He covers his face with his palms and rubs briskly, as though trying to scrub the fatigue off, and then they go into his hair, pushing it back and tucking it behind his ears.

“Maybe I should just bite the bullet and declare my love for Arcade. My father says that perfect men do not exist; I don’t think he’s ever met Arcade.”

“A match made in Heaven,” Sir Kenobi says easily, gesturing loosely with his hand. “I’ve never known a cleverer man.”

“He’s so funny. And sharp.”

“And not at all tied up in another woman.” Sir Kenobi smiles, and reaches forward to pluck a loose hair off the sleeve of his robe that you’re wearing over your sleeping gown, and drops the loose strand away.

And now you both are laughing at Arcade, and Adelaide, whom he seems to be tiring of. But you wouldn’t know. You haven’t seen much of Arcade ever since Sir Kenobi came home.

And you say, “Ugh, gross. He and Adelaide are always making out.” And you both laugh about that. And the you fall quiet. You sketch out a compass at the corner of the parchment and he watches your diligence and how your nose is almost pressed into the sheet. Then you and say, “I mean, I _do_ wonder what it’s like. The kissing parts.”

There’s another beat, and he dances around it, pretending he didn’t hear you and reaches a shaky arm across your desk and grabs some brass thing and asks, “So. What is this instrument for?”

But before his fingers can wrap around it, his elbow knocks at your small pot of ink and jars it. Some of the ink sloshes over the side and dampens your desk and the corner of your parchment, and blots out the compass you just finished. You gasp overdramatically and give him a furtive look, and act like you’re mad at him. You tell him, “Gods, you’re so clumsy, Sir Obi.”

“I apologize, sweetness. If only I was as graceful as Arcade. Please forgive me.”

You smile at the little name, and you just dip your finger into the spilled ink, and press a fingerprint onto the tip of his nose. He scrunches up his nose at this and then smiles at you.

And then you have ink spots on your face where his nose presses.

You’re not even trying to start something by bringing up the kissing that you’ve seen occur between Arcade and Adelaide…but you know what you are starting to feel for him: desire was the word that came to mind in clear and bolded lettering when you first saw him at the grotto. But his ignoring what you’ve brought up has made you feel a strong taste of insecurity, and you feel a little weird—like maybe you have bothered him over it, so you don’t know what to do or say now. Especially with him just looking at you like this in the candlelight and the sun’s dimming lights disappearing from behind your window.

But you also know you can be completely honest with him about anything you’re thinking about. But he must be thinking the same as you because you’re both leaning into one another very slowly, and his eyes flicker so, so quickly from your lips to your eyes within milliseconds of one another. In the back of your mind, you frantically cycle through all of the images you can recall of seeing Arcade and Adelaide kissing in hidden away corridors, your mind’s eye squinting very hard to focus in on what their lips were doing. You cycle through these images as quickly as your heart is trying to thud its way out of your chest. You know _how_ to kiss: you’ve done it to his hand and to the mark on his face that is starting to drive you wild, and maybe if you could just try to kiss him like that—

But his lips have pressed tentatively to yours with a small push as he leans into you, and nuzzling his nose into the crook of yours. It is a closed-mouth thing, but it is warm and soft, and you breathe in his strange cocktail scent of peppermint and lavender, and the small, sweet burn of honeyed alcohol from the mead he took after dinner this evening. Your lips are warm and dry, and the bit of wet on the tip of his sticks to you, and when he slowly pulls away, the small tug that grips them as he pulls away makes a small moan escape from your throat. You look at each other, and his face is burning with a blush that you had never seen before in all your years of knowing him.

He looks flushed and beautiful, and you want to tell him so badly, but you can’t because you’re leaning into him, bracing yourself on your hand curled around the arm rest of his chair, or you softly kiss him back, focusing on his lower lip. He all but throws his weight into you and desperately cups your face, pulling you into him, his nose almost poking you in the eye, and you lose your hands in his hair and tug harder than you normally would when you give him this affectionate touch outside the walls of your bedroom, and one of his hands moves from your cheek, and he cradles the back of your hand in his palm and smushes you into him. You pull away and rest your forehead against his, chest heaving, coming up for air. His fingertips tickle at your jaw, and then he rushes in for another one, passion pulling his body into yours the best and closest it can get in the strange positions you’re both sitting in. Your other hand cards into his hair that’s come loose from behind his ear and you tuck it behind his ear and then scratch at the scruff on his face and his soft groan tickles you in a way that his fingers don’t, moving you to open your mouth to him and your tongue presses a tentative touch to his lower lip. His inhale is sharp and he pushes himself away from you with a breathless, “Wait,” but doesn’t stop. Because its like you both can’t help it. The kissing tapers off slowly, and in lingering motions, of drawing each other’s lips into your mouths when you pull away until you feel that you’ve both started to calm down. And then, you are both looking at each other as if waking from a dream and you know he’s asking himself the same question: _did that really happen?_ And he leans in one more time and presses a sweet kiss to the corner of your mouth, and you press one onto his beauty mark.

When you stop kissing, his forehead is pressed into yours and he’s holding the lapis lazuli stone that dangles from your necklace chain between this thumb and forefinger. Both of your breathing calms, and you feel settled, but there’s a giddiness laced through the serenity that you’re both willing to wash over you in waves.

His nervous laugh breaks the soft silence, “I guess I wanted to know what it was like, too.”

Your nose presses into his hair and you press a small kiss onto his forehead and chide him gently. “I thought you knew everything.”

And he gets quiet, and that serious line of wonder creases in between his brow, and he gently strokes your face and admits softly, “I guess I don’t know everything yet.” He traces the back of his fingers down your cheek, leans in to kiss at your ear and whispers, “Go to sleep.” And he leaves you for the night.

4

  
The only thing on your mind for the next two weeks is the practice kissing that occurred in your bedroom with Sir Kenobi. You are so consumed with it that you fall behind on your correspondence with Padme, and you listen even less to your father. You don’t even hear him when he tells you that Viceroy Nute Gunray and his top man, Daultay Dofine, are set to stay for an entire week. The night before they arrive, you find yourself alone after dinner and go in search of your father and Sir Kenobi to see if they’re even going to join you in the parlor at all. You decide to check by your father’s political chambers first, and that’s where you find the both of them. And it sounds like they’re having a heated conversation.  
  
“You know the influence you carry over her, please work to have her understand that this is not a game,” your father says curtly, and you can see the flush in his face in the back of your mind. He’s only spoken to you like this a handful of times, and it always made you feel bad. You feel terrible that Sir Kenobi is enduring it at this moment, especially because of you and nothing of his own accord.  
  
But Sir Kenobi sounds heated, as well, and retorts, “She is well aware this is not a game; these men are foul at the very best and grotesque at the very worst.”  
  
“I understand that, Obi-Wan. But Viceroy Gunray is coming to call in the morning and he’s bringing his best man with him. This would be a very critical and strategic allegiance for the entire Republic if the courting takes. You know how hard it is to work with the Trade Federation.”  
  
“I cannot understand why, when politicians fail to do their work justice, that it is then the women who must suffer these pitiful corrections. She should not be treated as a bargaining tool. And the fate of the Republic should not rest upon one woman if a courting doesn’t take.”  
  
You hear your father sigh, and curse over Sir Kenobi’s comment about failed politicians. His response is icy, “The only pitiful thing here is your childish attachment.” Silence. And your father tries to smooth over these verbal wounds with his politician’s tone of recovery when he must backpedal, “I spoke too harshly; I understand your frustrations, but you must see this is necessary.”  
  
Sir Kenobi says nothing for this less than heartfelt apology. “You couldn’t possibly even begin to understand the _layering_ of my frustrations.”  
  
Your father says, “You have only yourself to blame.”  
  
Your father goes on to reiterate that he is being pressured because of the politics and misalignment between the Viceroy’s preferences in relation to taxation ratifications and revisions, and that he is frustrated with you, but could never be harsh with you so must be hard on Sir Kenobi because…

“You’re the only one she listens to.” Your father’s desperation is clearer, and there is a beat. Like he’s trying to figure out if he should say the next set of words, but he does anyway. “You were but a boy when you were gifted to her. But you’ve returned a man. And I know how a man’s jealousy can drive him mad with obsession. Do not become mindless—do not forget your oath, Obi-Wan.”  
  
“I may have been gifted to her, but she has returned that gift tenfold to me. And she has many more gifts to give, but to the right man. I do not forget my oath; but I believe that you sometimes do, Lord Organa: please remember that it is my sworn duty to ensure whoever she is promised to absolutely deserves her.”  
  
Your mind and heart are racing and you believe that they are finished with this conversation, but your father, like always, wants the last word.  
  
“Do not let desire turn you foolish.”  
  
But it is Sir Kenobi who has the last word. “If that is my fate, then I shall die a fool.”  
  
You begin moving away from the closed door a bit, but not quickly enough as Sir Kenobi yanks it open with the strength of two men, and both men just stare at you.

Your chest is filled with frustrated emotions and all you can do is blurt out, “I’m sorry, father. I’ll try harder, I promise.”

Sir Kenobi is flushed and flustered when he’s facing you, and his eyes are rimmed red, but no tears have welled up or spilled. His hardened gaze softens at the sight of you and at sensing you feeling upset and guilty at what you overheard, and he just gives you this absolutely crushed look and says nothing as he takes his leave.

You look to your father, and he’s still trying to cool down. He only asks you to shut his door.

So you follow after Sir Kenobi, walking briskly to catch up to him in the far corridor. You grab at his elbow and mutter another apology and he heaves out a sigh before turning to look down at you and catches your hand in his fingers. You press your other fingers into his scruff and kiss his beauty mark, intending to soothe him, and also because this is the only thing you can think to do.

  
  
  


  
  
  
  


5

It’s been two nights since you overheard your father and Sir Kenobi’s heated argument through the closed door, and no one has said anything about it. The dining room was filled with such an awkward air each night since then that even your poor attempts at breaking the silence will well-timed jokes or humorous epitaphs were met with dull stares. In an attempt to do better like you promised your father you would, you asked Sir Kenobi to join you in the library that evening after dinner rather than the parlor room that everyone has seemed to ignore so you could discuss your options with suitors moving forward.

You are desperate to get information out if Sir Kenobi this evening, for you knew he was to leave in the morning on business for your father. Your father has received a slew of communication from not only the Viceroy Gunray about additional unrest, but additional correspondence from Chancellor Palpatine himself about the same. You finally confided in your father about what Padme told you (not everything, and nothing about her notes related to Sir Kenobi). The long-ago mentioned phantom from Sir Kenobi’s earlier letter to your father has been weighing on Sir Kenobi’s mind once more. He’s become obsessed, actually, and he’s enlisted the help of his previous master and mentor, General Qui-Gon Jinn, to investigate a crime scene on the outskirts of Coruscant. Two trade federation foot soldiers had apparently been assassinated much in the same fashion as a murder that took place on the outskirts of Naboo that Padme told you about a couple of months ago. Sir Kenobi had assured you this new absence of his would be for investigation purposes only. 

“I need your counsel,” you tell him once he sits next to you on the sofa near the library’s bookshelves that are sagging under the weight of tomes you believe to be ancient. A dull, dusty smell permeates the room, as though some pages have been leafed through in quick succession. The fire is quiet and more contemplative rather than cozy and inviting like the one that usually burns in the parlor. 

“I don’t know what to do,” you finally break the silence, talking at your hands. You see that one of his is fidgeting with the ribbon you sent to him years ago and that he still wears. It is faded now, and the only word left visible on it is ‘everything’.

When he says nothing, you follow up, and look at him. “Who do I choose?”

When he doesn’t answer, you try your best to hide your frustrations and go on a soliloquy in great detail that outlines everything you hate about, but also somewhat like about, all the men who have come to visit over the past two years. 

Sir Kenobi holds an impatient hand up before you can even finish. “I know you are a lot of things: smart, kind, resourceful, creative…but I know you are not cruel. Don’t make me pick. It is your decision in the end.”

You are taken aback and blink in surprise. “I’m not asking you to _pick_. I’m asking your preference. Who would you like to see me end up with?”

“Please don’t make me talk about this”

“But we _have_ to talk about this.” Did he not remember the heated argument from a few nights ago that addressed this very issue?

His sigh is cruel, like trying to convey how sorry he feels for such a pitiful creature. And when he speaks, its almost academic. Or clinical. And his voice grows detached, like he is someone you don’t know at all. Like he was never your friend at all. “I suppose one would consider many factors.”

You shake your head at his vagueness. “That is not enough, Obi-Wan. I need you right now, okay? You talk me through everything…you’re my best friend.” 

His chest heaves and years of exasperation absolutely snaps from deep inside his heart, and for the first time ever, he raises his voice at you. “That’s the problem! I _am_ your best friend, and I love you. And that is why I cannot talk you through this.” When his little outburst is over, he is sad and quiet and he can only repeat himself. “Please. Don’t make me. I can talk to you about everything, but I cannot talk to you about this.”

You think about your father’s crude remark from long ago about how you need to wake up sooner rather than later before reality crashed all around you and scared you to death. You want to tell this to Sir Kenobi now. But you don’t. Instead, you say, “You’re supposed to help me do everything. That’s your charge, your responsibility. You will have to see me wed at some point. I won’t feel right unless you had _some_ kind of say in it. You must understand.”

“And _you_ must understand that I’d rather be stripped of my title than make this decision for you.”

You literally don’t know what to say. The fire smolders.

Sir Kenobi pushes himself to stand, and he seems reeling and unsteady. “I am leaving with General Jinn in the morning. You will not hear from me until my return. Do try to behave yourself. For your father’s sake.”

And he leaves you. 

—

You don’t sleep. 

Sometime before the sun comes up, you trudge to Sir Kenobi’s rooms around the corner from yours. You slide your necklace under his door. Its wrapped in a sheet of parchment with only the words: _Be careful_.

When you wake up in the true morning, your parchment has been returned under your door, and on the other side of it is Sir Kenobi’s sketch of Frederick with a speech bubble that says: _Be patient._

You don’t throw a fit over his absence.

You don’t ask him why he’s leaving you again, even though you know the reason.

And you don’t mope around the walls of the castle. 

—

6

But you _do_ snoop throughout your father’s political chambers while he’s away at the training grounds. If you were a cat, curiosity would surely kill you. 

There are only two recent letters on his desk, and they are both from General Jinn. You read the older one first and it is about the general detailing a conversation he had with Sir Kenobi prior to your father making the call for their investigation to be opened up.

_Lord Organa,_

_Obi-Wan has written me the most disconcerting letter. He told me directly, “I sense something is wrong and I remember you told me not to trust Chancellor Palpatine, and I’m beginning not to despite my Lord Organa encouraging otherwise. Please do not take this as an assassination upon his character. My charge has confided in me some worries passed along to her directly from the Chancellor’s niece herself. If Padme is worried about her uncle and his loyalties, then so am I. There has been much unrest. Particularly after these ambushes and sieges upon the Trade Federation’s foot soldiers throughout the Republic. They all seem to be attacked in the same way every time, and their remains are always found in the same way. I would like to humbly request an investigation be opened, and I request you lead it. I an unsure if anything will come of this, but I remember you once told me to tell you everything. So I am telling you now. Please come.”_

_I told the boy, “I understand what you are saying about the Chancellor, but he isn’t doing anything blatantly or openly wrong. I have seen no proof nor heard of anything to link him to these unsettling crimes. Are you sure you aren’t letting your feelings cloud your judgement?”_

_Lord Organa, I believe that Obi-Wan will have no rest at all until we investigate the trade route disruptions and quell his fears related to these (most likely) baseless rumors._

_Yours most sincerely,_

_Qui-Gon Jinn_

Then the newer letter:

_Lord Organa,_

_While away, Obi-Wan and I were met by a mysterious figure who ambushed us not two klicks from where the remains of the recently slaughtered foot soldiers were found. Our attempted assassin almost bested me. Had it not been for Obi-Wan’s heroic—if not foolish—and quick actions, I would not be writing this letter to you. Obi-Wan has sustained a somewhat serious injury; he is under the care of a medic. We are about two days’ travel away from you. We believe he will be fit for travel in a few more. He shall be home by the week’s end. The boy is adamant that our attacker was Chancellor Palpatine’s man, Lord Maul. I have asked Obi-Wan again and again ‘how can you be sure, how can you be sure?’. The boy claims he saw Lord Maul’s charge upon his clothing, and claims that nobody else has a charge like that. He said it was a manticore. He is irate with me, for I said that unfortunately is not enough proof to convict a man of any misdoings, and that we simply spent the past several days chasing ghosts in the desert. I believe the boy is blinded by the fear of losing his own charge. Again, be on the lookout in the next few nights._

_Yours most truly,_

_Qui-Gon Jinn_

****

7

“It is _so late_ ,” is all Sir Kenobi says to you when he wrenches his door open after you knock on it in the fashion that he typically knocks on yours. He looks disheveled, like he was undressed before this and had to pull all of his clothes on in one fell swoop.

“I had to see if you are okay.”

He all but yanks you into his room by the sleeve of his cloak that you’re wearing and he locks the door behind him. “Of course I am all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“The way you grabbed your shoulder when you dismounted Boga worried me.”

He cuts his eyes at you in the way that he usually does when he knows you’re lying to him. And this always wills the truth out of you.

“Fine. I read it in Qui-Gon’s letter to my father.”

His eyebrows disappear into his fringe. “So you read correspondences not meant for your eyes. I wish I was surprised to find out you’ve been reading out letters, but I should have known better.” You avert your gaze from him, but his fingers find your chin and his touch forces you to look up at him. His brow is knitted in concern and the disappointment in his eyes makes your stomach drop. “What did I tell you about using your eyes only for good, my little one?”

“I hadn’t heard from you in over a week. I had to know that you were all right.”

He sighs hard and shakes his head, dropping it entirely. “Fine. I did get hurt.”

“How did you get hurt? Show me.”

“That won’t be necessary. I am fine, I promise.”

But your quirked eyebrow makes him falter, and you know he’s lying to you. Your fingers go to the laces at the front of his tunic and you pull them loose. You press your fingers into where his tunic is now untied, onto the bare part of his chest that’s showing, and your jaw aches with a hungry desperation as you feel the coarse and beautiful hairs there. His fingers catch yours that are trying to creep into the hemline here, and tug to the side to examine him.

He pushes your fingers away and not without giving you a stern look, his fingers find the shirt’s hem close to his waist and he tugs at it, stretches, and pulls if off over his head. You would be lying if you tried to claim you didn’t stare at the swatch of dark hair at his abdomen in this stretch, and felt a swoon or swelling of affection at seeing it again, and the familiar frenzy over how he looks soft and hard there. His tunic falls to the floor, and you see the nasty diagonal gash at his shoulder that runs to his sternum, a thick and angry red raised welp, but closed up and not appearing to be infected.

“I foolishly didn’t think I would need to equip my pauldron for this journey.”

You both look at each other, hard, for a moment and seem to think the same thing: anytime Sir Kenobi has been called to service in the name of ‘negotiations’ has included everything but negotiations.

Your fingertips touch his wound, and he winces at first, but steps closer so you can soothe him. “I always thought you were invincible. That you could never get hurt.”

“I only wish that were true.” He catches your fingers and presses a soft kiss at the padding before letting go. He sits down at the foot of his bed, sighing with a weariness you haven’t heard from him in a while. You sit next to him, and look at the tired lines in his face and think about how handsome he looks, especially with the more noticeable flecks of gray in his hair.

Your fingers spread out over his stubble and you cup his face in your palm, and he relaxes in your touch, closing his eyes. You press your thumb into his beauty mark before kissing it, and you press your nose into it and you tell him, “You are the most beautiful man I have ever seen.”

And this shatters his heart, and he fiercely kisses you on the mouth, his nose crushing into your cheek because he is so excited and doesn’t angle his face to meet yours properly. Your fingers slide into his stubble and you fit your lips together more comfortably and he softens against you, pressing a tender kiss onto your bottom lip before his long eyelashes flutter shut. You arch into his chest, and one of his arms catches you at the small of your back, and your fingers pressing more fervently into his whiskers, and he gently pushes you back into his bed and his weight over your torso makes you excited and nervous and scared in all the right ways and you blurt out, “I watch you in the grotto sometimes.”

And he says, all breathless, his fingertips tickling a trail down your throat, “I know.”

And he silences you with his mouth, but you say against it, “I’ve seen you,” you pant, kissing his cheek and his scruff burns your nose. “I’ve seen all of you.”

He sighs a helpless sound after pressing his nose into your hair. “I know,” his fingertips stuttering at your throat again, and his other arm is shaking from holding his weight over you. And you grab him and pull him down to rest on top of you and he clumsily straddles one of your legs, and you feel him hard against your leg: the thing that you thought he didn’t have but it’s here now, and pressed into you, and you card your fingers through his hair and tug, exposing his throat and kissing that, whispering deftly against it, “Do you want to see me?”

And because he cannot lie to you (and also because he’s finding it increasingly difficult to deny you anything you wish of or from him), he tells you _yes_.

“Then look at me,” you say softly, and he as he unfurls you from his cloak you seem to live in, you watch his eyes shift from an eager excitement, to a shuddering surprise when he finds that you are wearing nothing at all under it. He gently pushes the fabric over your shoulders and leans forward to kiss each one. After the first, his hair falls loose and tickles your bare skin. And after the second, he presses his nose into the crook of your neck and inhales the scent of you, one of his palms flat against your side, and the other hand working to tug the cloak out from under you. You raise your hips to comply, and he groans into your neck when your pelvis meets his in this rush, his eyelashes fluttering like butterfly wings against your heated skin. He swats the cloak off of his bed and it falls onto the floor. And for a moment, he just holds himself over you, feeling your bare front against his; your soft breasts and pearled nipples pressed into his chest hair, and you hear a quiet and choked sob escape from his throat as he snakes an arm under your lower back to pull you closer to him still while he places languid and wet open-mouthed kisses against your neck and where your neck meets your shoulder before finding your mouth again.

“Obi-Wan.” You sigh into the soft skin at his neck that’s broken out into a heated sweat.

He catches your lower lip in his mouth and asks a muffled and busy, “Yes?”

“Will you put your finger in me?” You manage against his mouth, but it’s stuffy sounding.

“What?” He pants out, his fingers spread over your bare hip, and straining to squeeze you hard but he doesn’t.

You pull away from his mouth and press your fingertips against his swollen lower lip. “Will you put one of your fingers inside of me?” Your eyes are wide and shining up at his, and his pupils are blown wide and shining a beautiful obsidian that is working to consume the kind cerulean etched around them.

He pulls up and away from you, his eyes glazed over and with dumb arousal, his hair a mess. He looks at his palm, all of his fingers spread out and then gives you a helpless look with pronounced worry lines etched into his forehead and around his bright eyes. “Which one?” He is on his knees now, kneeling in front of you and you feel yourself grow damper at the sight thinking of how different and how much more illicit and gorgeous he looks like this than he ever did kneeling before you or beside you at the courts even in his best attire. Because here he is, no shirt, his simple trousers tight in all the right places and straining against his desperately hard cock that you know he’s thinking of but does not think to touch at all yet. And you spread your legs a bit wider and his eyes flit to your drenched folds and he bites at his lower lip and groans softly when he sees that you’ve left a damp spot on his bedding.

His fingertips slightly disappear under the tuft of hair at your mound and you let out what he would later describe as the prettiest sound he’s ever heard up until that point, when your hips lift off of his bed and into his touch.

“I don’t know how,” his shaky nerves admit to you.

“I didn’t at first,” you tell him, secretly thrilled that you finally have the upper hand on some knowledge that he is literally dumbstruck by. “I’ll show you.”

His fingers stay in your hair even when you reach down and trace a soft line from your opening, to gather some wetness, and up to the sensitive bud that hides between your inner folds. He sits back on his knees, palms on his thighs, and he leans in a little bit to watch your finger at work, his eyes flickering to your face every so often to watch your expression change. When your finger begins to trace small circles, and a soft moan escapes your list, he scoots closer to you and asks,

“Can I try?” And his hand reaches out towards you once you nod your consent. You guide him to the place, and his other palm rests against your inner thigh, pushing your leg back a bit more. His finger is clumsy at first, pressing a bit too hard and fast and you coo at him to slow down and go softer, and he does.

Your fingers find his hair and you give him an affectionate and encouraging tug and he scoots closer still, memorizing how you feel right here, and looking at your face, waiting for your expression to change. When it doesn’t, he follows your actions from earlier, sliding his middle finger down to your entrance and the pressure there earns him a feral sound that rips from your chest and up and out of your throat as your hips move against him, pressing your core harder onto his finger, and you rock against him as though trying to ride his hand. His cock is straining to exit his pants, and there is a slight damp spot where the tip of it is rigid against the thin fabric.

“Help me, Obi-Wan,” you say softly, pleasing him with another soft sound and his grip on your thigh is tighter. “Please.”

“Yes, whatever you need.”

“I need you to reach where I cannot.” Your fingers wrap around his wrist and you pull at him, guiding him further into you. He presses into you and you cry out with a new pressure—the difference in size between his finger and your own when you’ve experimented with this by yourself is extraordinarily different. There is an ache, but there is a burning hunger, and you feel like you will swallow him. And you want to. And you want him to want you to.

And he wants it, too.

Because he is now leaning over you and his mouth crashes into yours in a dumb and sloppy kiss that finally finally includes his tongue, and his tongue is in your mouth the moment that the entire length of his finger is fitted into you, curved perfectly all the way to the spot that makes you want to weep. And his finger stills, and you rock against his hand when you feel his knuckles softly pressed into you, and his other hand moves from your thigh and instead presses some of his weight just above your mound. You think it is your pubic bone, you recall from the moments you’ve stolen with your father’s medical texts. But this thought is ripped entirely from your head once Obi-Wan’s finger curls inside of you thrumming against the spot you have tried in vain for weeks to reach but could never. And his hand on your mound lowers, and shifts, and his thumb is now circling around your bud of sensitive nerves in the circles that you showed him from before and—

“Obi-Wan,” you cry out, perhaps too loudly, and his mouth covers yours in an attempt to quiet you down. But you just moan into his mouth, and you feel yourself clench around his finger in a dripping excitement you’ve never been able to achieve, and he cries out into your mouth, totally abandoning his hopes to keep you quiet.

But. Something…

Something is happening.

And Obi-Wan feels it, too.

“I don’t,” he starts, that helpless pull is back in his voice. Like he doesn’t know what to do, what to say. “What. What do I do? What do you need me to do?” His finger pushes back into you softly and you feel tears welling up at the corners of your eyes.

You tangle your fingers into his hair and pull him in for a soft kiss, and you plead against his mouth, “I need you to love me.”

“I love you,” he says, pushing all of his weight into you, into your core, all of the passion that’s been filled in the jar of his chest and screwed shut with such a tight lid for so long, spilling out, just like something spilling inside and outside of you, and a flare ignites from the inside out and you cry into his mouth, and you cry actual tears, and you cry his name and he keens after you, a soft _oh_ , and his nervous and shy tone, like you’ve stolen his breath and his heart away, “I love you.”

When he feels your fluttering dissipate, he slowly withdraws his hands from you and sits back on his knees, and studies you with tenderness in his eyes, and that deep thoughtful line between his brow once more. His palm moves to his chest, and he wipes off everything his hand had been gifted to him by your softest and sweetest spots into his chest hair, and his fingers once more return to your mound. A firm pressing comes from them; he is stilling you, soothing you.

And you just look at each other.

 **  
** And you finally say, with an embarrassed smile, “You know, I gave you a compliment earlier. Just a simple one about only being the most beautiful man in the world. One usually says thank you.”

He huffs out a laugh, “I can see your etiquette lessons took.” He watches you make room for him to join you at the head of the bed, and he settles into the pillows with you.

You snuggle close into him and he leans over the side of his bed to draw up his cloak, and you wrap yourself back into it before he pulls you securely back into his chest, waiting for you to fall asleep. He presses a kiss into your temple, and whispers into your hair, “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen; now go to sleep.” He strokes the hair behind your ear until you drift off.

And through the night, he is possessed with the insanity your father alluded to during their argument: going mad with affection. Possessive thoughts—brought on by the idea of the more serious suitors, the ones he told you not to worry about yet, and the thought of them seeing you like this, feeling you like this, and hearing you like this—swirl behind his eyes so clearly that he can almost read them: she is mine; I brought her up; no one knows her or loves her like I do; why can’t it be me?’.

He lets you sleep for a spell, but wakes you before dawn and you can tell that he’s been up all night. The look he gives you worries you that he’s about to say something that will break your heart: that this was all a mistake. And you are right, in a way.

“…We cannot do this.”

Your hurt feelings make you push yourself away from him so you can sit up and at eyelevel with him. “You are not the only one who can make pledges and oaths. In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you. And my heart will never not belong to you.”

He says, “I am beyond honored that you chose me,” he gently pushes your hair behind your ear, and holds your hand tightly in his, interlocking your fingers. “Of course, I could _only ever_ choose you.” Again, he repeats himself. “This cannot happen anymore,” but you don’t see any truth in his words, for it and the final words do not reach his eyes. They only look sad, and it hurts your chest.

—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh snap yall I forgot to say here: when reader says. “ In case you ever foolishly forget: I am never not thinking of you.” that is a line from Virginia Woolf; plagiarism wholly unintended there. I believe the line is from a diary and not another work. Sorry, Virginia!!! T.T


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we see how Reader and our dear Sir Kenobi’s evening evolve as she ages; we hear some unfortunate news; Reader and Sir Kenobi make a desperate decision together while alone in the woods when they think they must say goodbye to one another; and Reader must marry an awful man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS: Mature! 18+! Smut! Explicit! Palpatine assaults reader. This happens in the snippet in “3” where Palpatine is walking with Reader in the remote part of the castle. The part ends where the following sentence begins, “Before his fingers can work…”
> 
> NOTE: This is over 11,000 words long. Please excuse typos. My entire Sunday went into this, it took over 12 hours to write. Please let me know if you enjoyed it.

\--

1

By the time you have twenty-six years, you think about how all your life, you’d wanted nothing more than to be part of a secret. And one thing clarifies itself immediately on a morning after your knight’s evening visit where he’s stolen more time away with you than he should have. Obi-Wan Kenobi quickly becomes the only secret you ever wish to have and to keep.

It is like this:

On his nightly visits he watches you bent diligently over your cartography projects, perched in his armchair dragged over to your desk. While you work on that, he carves a replica of Frederick from wood he’s collected in the grotto, and fits Frederick’s little house with moss and other greenery you pick out in your afternoon walks through the woods for this terrarium. You both work silently. And when you take separate breaks, you gaze at the other still at work with unnamable pangs in your chests. And when the daylight is gone and the candles must be blown out, Obi-Wan drags his armchair back to its place next to your bed. And he stands by your door, watching you blow out some candles and screw the lids back onto your ink pots. And he hopes that you’ll walk up to him wrapped in his cloak, and he hopes that you’ll press your fingers into his exposed chest until your they creep up his throat and get lost in his scruff. And he hopes you’ll kiss him goodnight on his beauty mark. And you always do, just like you are tonight. And it's like you can read his mind: everything he hopes for, you do exactly as he wishes without him ever having to ask.

And he hopes that you’ll ask if he wants to _see you_ , and when he nods after a hard and nervous swallow, you let him pull the sash on his robe you’re always wearing and he’ll push it off your delicate shoulders so he can kiss you where your neck meets your shoulders. And he hopes that you’ll grab him by the front of his tunic and pull him close to you until his arm catches you behind the small of your back and he’s laying you down and holding his weight over you in the exact way he’s learned that you love so much. And he waits for you to ask if he wants to stop so he can say ‘ _no’_ even though he knows he should say _‘we cannot, we should not_ ’; and you will ask if he is sure, and he will whisper against your ear, his scruff scratching at your sweat-slicked neck, and his breath warm and enveloping your entire body, _‘yes, my little one, please’_. And he hopes that you ask him to kiss you, and he is aching for you to ask him to show you how much he loves you with his fingers. Every time, he touches are more sure and confident; he has memorized all past reactions and sounds, and works to make you sing for him in new ways each time.

And Obi-Wan has always been correct, in a way, with his past protestation of ‘we cannot’; but they were always incomplete protests. Giving himself to you in these moments of careful exploration, and letting you open up for him to take everything he’s got—from what his touches tell you; what his eyes say, that his mouth cannot—you quickly learn that what he’s been trying to admit all along is ‘we cannot _help ourselves_ ’.

This happens every night for months:

Like a key fitting to its lock, and like a sword fitting into its sheath, Obi-Wan’s hand curves over your mound perfectly, and you arch into him as though there is any more space to close between your contact at all. His fingers brush into your hair there, and he coos over how lovely you look, so open in front of him, and how proud he feels to have you under his touch. You feel stilled and secure in his warm palm, and shudder over the feeling of his long fingers spread out over your lower belly. The heat coiled there unleashes in a leaking wave when his eyes dart to your face and you meet his gaze, his hair falling into his eyes. His fingertips thrum out the pattern of the knock he gives your door when asking permission to enter your rooms. You nod; he lowers his head from where he’s kneeled between your spread legs and kisses your knee, moving his hand lower. And when his middle finger meets your aching slit, it is like sliding into a hot and exquisite oil—the aroma was far move lovely than anything he’s known before, and the way his finger curls inside you is like a groove made for only him, and the way you cry out his name makes him sigh yours in response and he hushes you with a kiss and crushes himself into you. He is your secret, like this. And in these moments together, you both forget everything but your secret. And he forgets that he ever told you this could not happen anymore.

Obi-Wan begins spending not just his evenings, but his nights with you. It starts off—just like tonight—with making himself small, curled up in his armchair next to your bed, and watching you until you fall asleep. Sometimes you would wake up, only hours later and before dawn, to find him missing—returned to his own space. Sometimes, and more frequently as of late—just like tonight—you are able to coax him into bed with you and he all but flies out his chair to bury himself in between your bedding with you and pull you flush against him, his front to your back, his knees behind where yours bend for him, and an arm wrapped over your front that would reel you in closer still even though it were impossible.

He has one hard and fast rule for the nights he would join you: that his trousers must stay on, and that you must not touch him below the waist. And even though you detested this rule more than any other one he’s ever made you follow, you respected this boundary. Tonight, you can feel how hard he is through the thin fabric of his sleeping pants as he presses himself into your backside. And he knows that you’ve reached peak frustration with this rule when your hips start stuttering backwards into his and grind against him. He pulls you close in this moment, as if to still you—steady you—and his hand with his long fingers lightly trails down your belly in ghostly tickles until they find your thigh. He moves your leg just so, spreading you open for him, and he uses his fingers from behind you to gather your slick and moves into you. His other arm is snaked under your neck. When you cry out at him pressing the entire length of his middle finger into you, his other hand moves from where it is laying idly to cover your mouth to stifle the volume you sometimes cannot control. 

And tonight is different. This is when the biting starts: on your back, where your neck meets your shoulder, in a space where he knows your clothes will hide any left-over markings. His biting is soft at first, gauging the extent to which you will allow it. Your nails digging into his forearm—muscles taut from their ministrations—tell him to keep going. Your breath against his palm is hot, and his hand grows damp from it. He bites you harder, and adds a second finger into you, and when you moan against his hand, he can’t help but respond to your call. His fingers plunge deeper, and the pleasure is almost too painful to hold. You struggle against his hand covering your mouth until you find the soft, firm spot of his hand’s heel and you bite him softly, eliciting a stifled and weak groan in his throat. He laves at the marking he’s left on you after his latest marking with the tip of his tongue at first, and then broadly; you do the same to his hand before moving to bite him harder and he presses his hips into you, pulling his fingers out of you (and you feel a whole sense of loss from this new absence of two instead of the usual one), and he curls his hand over your mound.

His fingers work circles and firm strokes around your sensitive bud, but he also pulls you into him every time he presses into you, grinding himself through his trousers against your bare ass, and you push back every time. He feels so big against you, and you feel a damp spot on the fabric of his sleepwear. And you feel like you’re going to lose control because you don’t know if the spot is from you or from him, so you bite his hand even harder, forgetting to lick his wound, and keep your teeth bared down as you ride your orgasm out on his hand. And he’s huffing erratically behind you, his hand pressed totally flat into your lower belly, clutching you into him, his hips moving sloppily and breath frantic in your ear. That desperate little groan is back, and it makes you ache so deeply inside, you feel like the aftershocks of your orgasm shall _never_ recede.

He whines lowly in your ear, trying to communicate something to you, and you say, “I know, Obi-Wan,” encouraging him, and you slide your hand over his wrapped around you and he buries his forehead into the crook of your neck from behind.

He cries out, a frustrated sound like he’s trying to ask for help, and presses muffled words against you in between kisses. You can only understand bits and pieces: _‘little one’_ , _‘sweet angel’_ , and _‘darling one’_ , and they all make your stomach hurt in the familiar ache of rabid and rapid affection that you always felt upon seeing him every time he returned home from his absences.

He removes his hand from your mouth and the room’s air is cold on the damp left behind from sweat and from your licking, and he snakes that arm under your side pressed into your bed. He wraps his arms around you tightly over your front and kisses you desperately at your ear and your neck.

You feel a swell of pride that he’s been reduced to noises only, incoherent speech, and you flush when you think this is how he must have felt the first time you showed your bare self to him and asked him to touch you, when you could only make sounds for him or look at him wordlessly.

And then, you think of a crude word you remember hearing Arcade say years ago when you eavesdropped outside the older girls’ rooms when Adelaide was missing from the other rooms in the castle and you’d gone to investigate. But the sounds Arcade had made on the other side of the door were not soft like Obi-Wan’s—they were strained and more animalistic—and Arcade was nearly howling, and he said, _‘Addie, you’re going to make me—_

Obi-Wan’s arm in between your side and bed remains, and pulls you into him, but his other hand slides up and up, in between your breasts, and stops cupped around your throat and you gasp softly at this new pressure, this new way of being held, and you feel yourself grow wetter than before. “Sweetling, I’m going to—”

_‘Addie, you’re going to make me come.’_

“Oh, I’m going to come, little one,” his hands are firm on you, like he’s holding on for dear life until his feverish mindlessness ebbs away and his hip are softly jerking into you and your name is spilling from his lips just as you feel something spilling from inside of him, the fabric of his thin trousers now soaked against your backside. His teeth have calmed against your skin and turned to slow, soft, open-mouth kisses and when his mouth quit working you over from behind, you knew he was asleep and you soon would be too.

—

And the next morning is different, too, because it is the first time Obi-Wan is still in bed with you, let alone in your room period, when you wake up. He has always left at some point in the lonely and dwindling hours before dawn—you’d grown used to waking up alone. But this morning is different because you’re waking up to his fingers tracing lines up and down your bare shoulder and folding you into him until your face is in the crook of his neck, with your hand roving over the hairs on his chest before stilling and before he covers the back of it with his much larger palm.

A knock comes at your door and before you can even look at one another and even begin formulating a plan about how you’re going to answer it, your father bursts into your rooms. You and Obi-Wan jolt in your bed, and sit up with your backs against the headboard, his arm around your shoulders clutching you to him and you clutching his robe shut around your bare body. It’s like an absolute silence falls all over the space; it’s like the wind itself stills outside and all of the air leaves the room entirely. Nobody is breathing, it seems. Your father’s eyes dart from you basically entangled in Obi-Wan’s brown robe, to Obi-Wan with his hair a clear mess, remnants of impassioned fingers pulling and tugging in a fevered frenzy from the night before. Your father’s eyes rove over Obi-Wan’s bare chest the golden red hair swathed across it burning in the morning light, your bedding draped lazily over his waist, and then back to you pulled against his side. Lastly, your father’s eyes see your hand in Obi-Wan’s lap with your fingers clutching at your sheets laying over it, and Obi-Wan’s free hand covered over the back of your hand. It’s like you’re both frozen and Obi-Wan’s grip tightens around your shoulders.

Your father’s fingers stroke at his goatee thoughtfully and his brow is terse, but his eyes shine like they’re not surprised in the slightest. He sighs, “I have been looking all over this damn place for the both of you for the entirety of the morning.”

You wince and your father’s eyes cut towards your face and his frown is so tight his lips may as well not been there at all. “We have guests. Chancellor Palpatine and his niece are here for an announcement. I’m sure you are completely unaware. I certainly was not expecting this. It has absolutely blindsided me, and I have been scrambling to find a way to keep them entertained while I’ve searched for you.”

“Lord Organa—” Obi-Wan starts, and you are totally surprised over how steady he sounds.

But your father only holds up his hand, his palm facing you both to keep you silent. “Please dress in your best and come down to the parlor as quickly as you can… _Separately_.”

Before he leaves you both, he gives Obi-Wan a pitying look and shakes his head as though he has been let down entirely. You can’t help but think about the time they had an argument in your father’s political chambers. About the time your father was telling Obi-Wan how he must not forget his code. About how Obi-Wan had only himself to blame for his feelings. And how Obi-Wan said that he would die a fool for you. You wince again when your father all but slams your door, and you immediately pull away from the man in your bed.

He catches your hand before you slip away entirely, and his other hand cups your face and brings you into him for a sweet kiss. His long eyelashes flutter shut and he breathes, “I love you. You can handle this; you will get through this, I promise you.”

And one more kiss, lingering, his tongue brushing into your mouth. And instead of that excited flare you usually get when he’s brave enough to use his tongue, you’re instead left feeling hollow and empty. Like he’s kissed you goodbye.

He shrugs into his tunic and pulls his boots on without tying them, and leaves you alone to get ready by yourself.

2

Obi-Wan enters the parlor last and he’s holding a semi-carved bit of wood in one hand and his carving knife in the other. He’s dressed in his fine, silk doublet in his signature light blue and white colors. The white colors swirl over the base blue, and the doublet is layered over his finer white long sleeved tunic—the collar covers the entirety of his neck and the tunic’s bottom falls long and past his waist and over his well-fitted khaki trousers that taper off and disappear into his knee high chestnut leather boots. Hi gait is almost regal as he enters a room with all eyes on him, and an energy of judgment burning from the Chancellor that silently screams: you’re late.

Obi-Wan sits in the floor next to the unlit fireplace and crosses his legs like he always does, like he’s going to meditate but doesn’t. His bright gaze flickers over you to see you seated with Chancellor Palpatine (who is sitting too closely to you) on one of the sofas, and then to Padmé seated next to your father on the other. Lord Maul, clad all in black, stands at the corner of the room, near a bookcase with his arms folded and watching the room with his molten eyes. Obi-Wan’s gaze lingers on Maul’s before he gives a tight lipped smile and a nod of acknowledgement, and then turns towards the piece of wood in his hand and he examines it while Palpatine and your father chat idly about the Marriage Law that’s come to a frenzied peak in recent months, and the accelerated unions that have spread all over the different nation states. You can barely hear the other men’s chattering because you are far too distracted by the thread that’s keeping Obi-Wan’s doublet cinched shut over his tunic, and also by him shaking his hair out of his eyes. You want nothing more than to find a ribbon and tie his hair back for him, but because you know you can’t, you sadly realize those days are now long in the past.

The only sounds in the room are coming from Obi-Wan’s carving knife as he quietly waits for the room to start talking so he can listen politely. Like the good lap dog Chancellor Palpatine has always believed him to be.

The Chancellor begins, “I profoundly appreciate your hospitality to our sudden visit early this morning, Lord Organa. I only regret that the Lady of the house was unable to share breakfast with us.”

Chancellor Palpatine’s gaze is so focused on your father that you steal a glance at Obi-Wan, and his cerulean gaze is burning with alertness, but his hands remain steady on his craft. Obi-Wan rolls his eyes at you at Palpatine’s passive-aggressive attempt to get a rise out of you; you roll yours back, and Obi-Wan smiles demurely down at his working hands. You ache after them, thinking about how only hours ago they were touching you all over of slipped between your folds. You bunch up some of your dress’s fabric in your hand and grip at it to try and will away these waves of desire.

“I apologize again, Chancellor Palpatine, about missing breakfast,” you say, trying to emulate your father’s fake political niceties. “I was up all night; I didn’t get much rest.”

Palpatine’s face is etched in annoyance masked as concern. He’s not doing a good job. “Well, why ever not, my dear?”

In this moment, you are annoyed with Palpatine—he speaks much like a grandparent would. Or, how you think one would if you had one around.

“I cannot put my _finger_ on it…it was like I was kept awake all night by something…toying with me.” All you can think about is how early Palpatine came to the castle; probably around the same time that you were coming all over Obi-Wan’s hand.

Obi-Wan coughs from his spot in the floor—nobody seems to notice—and is again staring down at his craft intently, his thumb stroking at the grooves etched into it; again, he’s smiling demurely, and your chest aches. You are ill with want.

“It is quite all right, my dear,” Palpatine finally says, covering your hand (that’s still clutching a fistful of your dress). His skin is clammy and you let go of your dress to clasp your hands together, to free yourself from his hold, and press them into your lap. A line forms deep between his eyes and it is cold and thoughtful—quite the exact opposite of the one Obi-Wan forms when he’s deep in thought. “It is quite all right, my dear. I only wished for you to be near so that you were alerted of the most delightful news at the precise moment that your father was.”

Your stomach drops because you know what’s coming. It was hinted at: in the way your father told you to dress in your finest; in the way that he and Palpatine’s chatter was about the Marriage Law with how they were trying to normalize the new about the speed in which people are rapidly coupling up in these binding contracts; with the way no one has made an appointment to come visit you for over a year now.

Obi-Wan’s thumb stops stroking the piece of wood in his hand.

Palpatine continues, puffed up and proud that he has everyone’s rapt attention in the room. “After many years of deliberation on your behalf, my dear Lady Organa, and the turning away of all potential suitors, and after many years of _fierce_ hoping on my part, it has been determined—set in stone, really—that you and I are to be wed by the end of this week.”

And there’s the drop. All of your insides, gone with the ending of his sentence. This is it. Because so many women and their families were failing to comply with the first string of laws, there was a clause in the latest Marriage Law: any woman over the age of twenty-five must conform to the first man’s proposal sent to said woman’s father. Stiff penalties followed anyone who disobeyed, beginning with all ‘guilty’ parties being charged with treason against the Republic’s effort to bring harmony to all spaces through these binding bonds.

Everyone in the room is looking at you. All of the air seems to be gone, just like it had left your room this morning. You don’t know what to say, until a sound comes tumbling out of your mouth:

“Oh.”

You bite at your lower lip and feel tears stinging at your eyes. You want to look at Obi-Wan so desperately, but you know the moment that your eyes meet his sweet, kind blue gaze that this will be the instant your heart breaks irreparably.

“Dear niece,” Palpatine says, this time forcefully wringing your hands free from one another to tightly hold one in both of his.

Obi-Wan has watched the other man’s hands the entire time he’s been in the room and he’s now sat his craft aside and is on his feet; Lord Maul’s eyes are locked on Obi-Wan’s fists clutched at his sides.

“I told you, Padme,” Palpatine continues, “that she would be speechless, moved to tears. I knew it. I _knew_ you had been pining after me all these years, Lady Organa. It never did make any sense why else you would deny the many men who have visited you throughout the years.”

“ _Who_ has determined this?” Obi-Wan blurts out from his place on his feet. His eyes are absolutely blazing, and perhaps because you are sitting down and he is standing, he seems much more formidable than you can ever recall. Yes, this is your knight who would lay his honor on the line just to protect yours. This is your knight who would risk every good thing tied to his name just to keep you safe and happy for one single minute.

“The law,” Lord Maul says from his corner where his arms are crossed over his chest. “He just said.”

Obi-Wan just gapes at Palpatine’s man, shakes his head and moves over to your father. “Lord Organa, you simply cannot—”

“Sir Kenobi, you forget yourself,” your father starts, rising out of his chair. Here is his harsh tone again. It’s almost like listening to their argument all those years ago. But exceedingly more uncomfortable. And you can hear what your father doesn’t say, and won’t say, but you know he _wants_ to say: _You only have yourself to blame, Obi-Wan._

There is a beat.

“The boy is upset,” Palpatine says, throwing his hands up in an easy way as though he just solved one of the mysteries of the universe. He moves to his feet after dropping your hand away. You wipe your hands off on your dress like it will scrub away the seeping discomfort that’s dripped into your pores since being under his touch. Padme gives shoots you a worried look, and an encouraging half-smile. “It is perfectly understandable.” Palpatine says about Obi-Wan. “He’s not really served the Republic’s army for years; he feels that he is no longer of any use to anyone now that your daughter will soon belong to me.”

Obi-Wan whips around to face the Chancellor directly, and throws his arm out in frustration, gesturing towards you. “She doesn’t _belong_ to anybody! And _certainly_ not to _you_ just because you’ve got some ludicrous piece of paper that says so!” His cheeks are flushed, and you can see his chest heaving, and see the tremble in his hands as he pushes his hair back from his forehead where some of it has fallen into his face.

Palpatine only smiles at him in that strange and vacant way of his where it doesn’t reach his (unkind) eyes. “I’ve said it before: the boy is loyal to a fault. But what else can you expect from his kind? He is far more emotional than most men; he lacks the parts of anatomy that keep us real men rational and steady.”

Obi-Wan’s hand is in his beard, fretting at the hairs, and the line between his eyebrows is etched deep, but his eyes are absolutely wild, and before he can say something that will cause irreversible damage, you leap to your feet and go stand beside him.

“Sir Kenobi is no boy; he is the man who has protected me for most of my life. And you will not speak to him in this terribly crass and cruel way, Chancellor.”

Palpatine studies your face: the defiant glint in your eyes and the impudent way your chin is turned up towards him, and the way you are standing in front of Obi-Wan, as though shielding his body from the Chancellor’s. He nods, several times, studying you, eyes narrowing. Then speaks directly to your father. “I have told you for years this attachment has been unhealthy, that it is far too long in the tooth. Not to worry, not to worry.” Then to you, “The attachment _will_ be severed, and the tooth shall be excised.”

3

The next several days pass strangely: they both take far too long to get through, but also pass by in a blur. More and more people fill the empty rooms of the castle—you don’t ever remember these walls being at such a full capacity, even during the yearly tournaments held in your father’s tiltyard. You steal away with Padme every chance that you can. You almost always walk along the beach. She holds your hand at these times, almost too tightly like she is the one whose life is over, and tells you how sorry she is that her months of letter writing never reached you. You assure her over and over again that it is not her fault. That you should have written more, that because you hadn’t heard from her in so long you assumed she had been away or ill and had a very good reason for not writing. She has been furious since her arrival to learn you never received her letters and is certain that her uncle has meddled with having them intercepted somehow.

The only time that you don’t get to steal away with Padme is the day before the wedding. You are numb throughout the many preparations. The older girls squeal over you being fitted for last minute alterations for your dress, and give you kisses all over your face and tell you how delighted they are that you are getting married to a man who holds such prestige. Adelaide tells you that one of them will take care of Sir Obi when you finally leave home. You immediately break down in a hysterical fit of sobbing once they and the seamstress leave your room.

In between the preparations made throughout the week and in between the time spent with Padme, you were obligated to spend time with Chancellor Palpatine, unescorted. These moments almost always meant hours-long strolling across the castle grounds and the training yard. Sometimes he would try to take you through the woods and you would subtly steer him in the opposite direction of the grotto and the little fort you built so many years ago. Because you hadn’t seen Obi-Wan except at mealtimes, you assumed that he was hiding out in the grotto and you wanted to give him the utmost privacy for once in your life. Every day you wondered if he waited for you there.

The final alone time that you had with Palpatine was spent wandering the castle. This was just hours before the grand meal of the evening where everyone was set to talk about how the wedding ceremony would go in the morning. A rehearsal of sorts.

Palpatine had brought you to the wing of the castle where most of the staff stay. And because all of the staff were extraordinarily busy with making dinner for the many guests, you were both alone in one of the most remote corridors.

He stops walking and steps in front of you and grabs your hands in both of his. “I know you must be very anxious to leave the only home you’ve ever known and the people that you love and call friends. You must be especially upset to leave your father behind.”

You only nod, you heart slowly hammering its way up your throat as he slowly walks you backwards and into a cold brick wall.

“But you must know better than that. You are far too old to be this childish. Every woman must leave her life behind for her husband at some point. You are very fortunate that I never gave up on you. You are far too old, too, to be considered any sort of level of desirable to even the most ineligible if bachelors. In time, you will thank me for this tremendous favor.”

Your heart has made it to your mouth. Your lips are numb and your jaw won’t work and there’s the familiar prick of tears at the corners of your eyes that never seemed too far away these days and you worried yourself to bear death thinking that this will soon be your new daily normal. Your eyes fall to the floor and you try to steady your breathing by looking at the stones. But his fingers press into your chin and he forces you to look into his eyes, at his watery gaze.

“Thank me.” His other hand tangles itself into your dress and starts pulling it up. “Do it. _Now_ ,” he says roughly, hiking your dress to your hips and roughly cupping your mound in his hand and you choke out a sob.

Before his fingers can work their greasy way any deeper into your clothing, he is suddenly hurled off of you and thrown into the wall in front of you on the opposite side of the hall. His back slams against it and his arms fly up, the backs of his hands making a slapping sound as they connect with the hard surface. Obi-Wan is towering over the Chancellor, breathing heavily, the front of the Chancellors clothes are balled into Obi-Wans fist, and the length of his forearm is pressed into the Chancellors chest, pinning him against the wall.

You force your crying to taper off and wipe your face as dry as it can get before readjusting yourself and Palpatine laughs his fake, oily laugh.

“Obi-Wan. I am quite astonished that a grotesque eunuch could even understand what was happening between a man and his soon to be wife.”

“That isn’t how a man treats the woman he claims to love.”

“I pity you creatures, Obi-Wan, I honestly do. Your kind is simply fully unable to understand that these physically affectionate things happen between a man and a woman when they are promised to one another. Was it inappropriate of me to begin prior to the nuptials? Perhaps. But what can you expect when two people have been waiting to be together for years and years?”

Obi-Wan’s grasp tightens around the Chancellor’s clothes, and Palpatine only laughs. “What are you going to do, dear knight? Strangle me in the hallway?”

Obi-Wan lets go of the Chancellor completely. “The Lady must return to her rooms and ready for tonight’s dinner party. I’ve been sent to escort her.”

“One last hurrah, for you, to stand in her shadow,” Palpatine sneers, readjusting himself. And then directed towards to you, “To be continued, my love. I look forward to seeing your radiance tonight.” And he stalks off in the opposite direction.

Obi-Wan’s shaking hands go to his hair and he smooths it back before turning to face you, and grasps your upper arms in his soft embrace. “Are you okay, my little one?”

It has been so many days since you heard him call you that, that you almost break down in tears again. Instead you press your lips together and nod. He whips his head in the direction Palpatine went in to make sure the coast is clear before pressing a tender kiss against your forehead, and then he offers you his arm to walk you back to the other side of the castle.

You walk in silence, and when you both are certain no one is around, Obi-Wan will lift his arm up just so to where he can reach the back of your hand to place a brief kiss before pressing his nose into your skin there.

When you reach your antechamber, he hangs back, in the threshold between it and your rooms, until you ask him to please come inside. He does, shutting the door quickly behind him, his back pressed into it.

“Were you really sent for me?”

“No.”

“I’m glad you came looking for me.”

“I have been driving myself mad this entire week. Every time he takes you away, I don’t know what to think. I’ve tried following you both, but I think he’s sent his man to look after me every time. He is never far.” His fingers are running anxious lines all over his facial hair and you step towards him and grab his wrists to make him stop. “He is with Padme right now. She is keeping him engaged in the dining hall.”

“Lucky for us.”

“Not luck; Padme is a good friend. She has planned this so I could meet you, alone.”

You say nothing. Here’s your heart in your throat yet again, but with the familiar tug of affection that threatens to crush your soul at any instant.

Obi-Wan kneels in front of you and bows his head, not at all unlike any time that he’s done this for ceremonies or any sort of proper event where he’s had to escort you. “I know that it is too late. And I know that everything has gotten out of control, and that your fate was never in my control to begin with.” You move closer to him and slip your fingers into his hair and give it the affectionate tug that you always do when he is in front of you like this. “I love you; I know you know this. But I am pledging my heart and soul to you; they are yours, unconditionally, and they have always been yours. I belong to you in a way that I should have never allowed happen. I am yours. And I will wait for you. Even until my dying breath, I will still wait for you. And ever after then.”

4

Palpatine is still emboldened by the time the dinner party begins. He claims Obi-Wan’s usual seat that’s across from you, saying, “I want to be in perfect view of my blushing bride to be.”

This leaves Obi-Wan seated next to you, and you are so nervous about everything going on—your father practicing his speech; Palpatine practicing some speech about how this marriage signifies not just a union of love, but one for all of democracy—that Obi-Wan presses his fingers into your knee under the table. You wrap your fingers around a couple of his and you are gripping at them as if you letting go of him would make you fall off the face of the earth.

When most of the guests have gone to bed after dinner, Obi-Wan escorts you to your room like he used to do. You are preoccupied with so many thoughts: Obi-Wan’s declaration and pledge earlier; Palpatine’s speech that basically dehumanized you and exoticized your marriage; thoughts about how you didn’t want to go to sleep because that meant as soon as you wake up, the ceremony would be the next immediate thing. Like your earlier walk, you don’t talk to one another. In your antechamber, you tell him you have a parting gift for him and that you want to give it to him at your spot in the grotto. You want to be away from prying eyes. You tell him to meet you there, near sunset

You and Obi-Wan sneak out of the castle separately.

5

So, years ago when Obi-Wan was away and ‘negotiating’, you jokingly told him in a letter that you destroyed the castle and moved into the grotto. He had responded by sending you a poorly wrought iron gag nail. You actually built a small fort out there to go hide in from time to time, and used his nail to hang up the leather satchel he used to put his memory letters in. This is the space that, years ago still, you would hide and watch Obi-Wan swim. But as you matured, this became the place that you and Obi-Wan would sometimes meet to practice kissing, or where he would teach you how to practice sparring.

At tonight’s dinner, you thought about how you are tired of always having to say goodbye to him in the castle, which is why you asked him to meet you at the fort.

He is there first, pacing; he is fretting. His hand’s don’t know whether to stay in his hair or his beard. You are both in your bed clothes, and you have his cloak on over yours.

The sun is near to setting, and when he turns to face you, his expression softening at the sight of how small you always seem to look when wrapped his cloak, you all but thrust a carefully folded-up parchment into his hands and tell him it is a map you have been working on in your spare time throughout the week.

“It shows you how to get from here to Palpatine’s castle,” you tell him as his eyes flit over the page and he marvels over the intricate lines and wonderful drawings, humming over the small Fredericks that you draw where the sea should be. “In case you ever need to find me. You shall always be able to find me with this.”

He slides another one from behind it. This one isn’t so well-made—it is obvious it was one of your earlier works. There were parts on the page that are clearly amateurish at best; he can see where additions were made because the craft is more masterfully executed. “What is this?”

“I told you, years ago, that I was drawing your adventures. That is from when you were away when I was sixteen.”

“Before I came home for the tournament.”

“Yes.”

He’s frowning, and his throat is working to swallow back a well of emotions. “This is terribly made,” he jokes to break the awkward silence, and laughs at you with tears welled at his eyes as he folds the maps back up and holds them in his hands. “I love them very much. Thank you. I still cannot believe that you ever buckled down to master a craft.”

You only smile at him. A crow calls. You are ever-mindful of the day light rapidly slipping away. You finally break the silence. “I’m scared, Obi-Wan.”

“I know.”

You frown, much like he did earlier, in an attempt to swallow everything but your words. “I don’t want to go. I don’t love him.”

He says, “I know. It is tremendously cruel that you’re being taken away from me.”

“I cannot go.”

He can’t speak.

But you somehow can. “I cannot bear the thought of being without you for the rest of my life. I’ve carried the heaviest pain in my heart to think this. I was never able to fathom that your service would end, that your purpose would end so inhumanely.”

And he tugs at the cloak’s sleeves, “My purpose will _-always-_ be you. Do you understand? Until the end of my life, and ever after that. My heart has been heavy with the knowledge that I shall no longer know solace…once he takes you away.”

There’s another beat.

You will yourself to be brave. This is your only chance. “I didn’t only want to gift you the map tonight. I wanted to say goodbye.”

“I know.” He sniffs, and covers his mouth with his hand again.

Before he can speak, you are interrupting him. “No. You don’t. You _don’t_ know.” And so he waits for you to continue, scared to death about what you could possibly say next. “I want to give you something no other man will ever have. Something… _that_ man…doesn’t deserve.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi’s heart is failing him, he feels like he may pass out.

You finish, “And I think you’ve wanted to gift me with something like that, too. For a very long time.”

He sways, like he’s swooning and like his head it filled with a cloud of toxins and he’s forgotten to breathe. It’s like he’s in crisis mode because of the codes, because of his oath. You can read it on his face, and you can see the line drawing deeply in between his brow, and before he can say something that will break your heart, that stupid mantra of ‘we cannot’, you fucking quote a knight’s code at him:

“No one should be deprived of love without the very best of reasons.”

And this breaks him. “I have spent too many years of my life waiting until I could see you again. And in all that time, the only thing I could never find was a reason to let you go.”

He bends down to lay the maps upon the ground and lays some stones over the tops of them so the humid summer wind wouldn’t blow them away and you step close him. When he’s standing straight again, you reach out to untie the knot at the top of his tunic with stuttering fingers. He grasps your them and kisses the padding on each of them to steady you. You pull the string and he pushes his robe off your shoulders, and you shrug out of it. He shakes it out like a blanket and lays it at the ground floor of the fort and steps close to you, fumbling with the buttons at the chest of your sleeping gown. Your fingers trace lines down the front of his tunic and he shivers at the light pressure and helps you pull his shirt up and over his head. It messes his hair and you laugh at the strands standing up and run your hands through it, mussing it more and he leans into this, humming out a soft laugh. And he gets all of your buttons opened and pushes your gown down to your hips and you shimmy it all the way off. Youve broken out in a sweat and not just from this sweltering night. But because this is another moment of truth. Another moment where you need to be brave. This is the moment he’s going to finally allow you to take his trousers off.

He senses your anxiety and moves closer to you. He presses his fingers into your hips and his forehead against yours. “We can stop.”

“No. Please. I want you.” You wrap your arms around his neck and you both gasp raggedly when his bare chest presses into yours, and you feel a feral haze fog up the base of your brain over the fact that your skin is as close as possible.

He lets go of your hips, but keeps his forehead pressed to yours and his eyes closed as he makes quick work of kicking off his untied boots and he pushes his trousers off in one fluid movement. And they meet your gown on the ground in the dirt and grass. His hand rest at your shoulders and then move up and up until he’s cupping your face in both hands and pulling you into a sweet kiss before pulling away to look you over with his bright eyes. The dark, dark black of his pupils are blown wide and are swallowing the cerulean blue.

Finally, you are both fully nude and it’s like you don’t know how to start. And it’s like you both don’t know how to talk—you’ve made your declarations, said all of the sweet words. Now your lips must speak to one another, but in a different way. And your hands, and…And you’re just standing here. And you realize, ironically, that you finally have what you’ve always wanted: for you both to be equally clueless about something.

He grabs your hand gently and pulls you towards the fort and directs you to lay on top of his cloak that’s spread out on the ground.

His exploration is slow and tender: he’s running his hands up your legs and he stops at every imperfection he finds and remembers where such batterings came from: the scar on your knee, earned from scaling the short cliffs on the beach when you were thirteen, the whole ordeal ending in you swatting him away when all he was trying to do was clean your wound; a long and thin scar from when you were eleven and tried to befriend a wild cat but it only clawed your thigh to shreds—you’d slapped him in the face when his first aid hurt you very much. These small markings, only on your legs, his fingers slowly circling around them, feeling the memories.

All these reminders of you growing up and of how he has been with you the whole time, and now you are grown. And now you are the woman he loves.

And now he is nudging your spread legs wider, his palms against your knees, and he on his and then his lips on the inside of one of your thighs, trailing kisses all the way up, his beard leaving a burning path behind until his nose is nuzzling its way into your folds. And his breath is extraordinarily hot against your wet warmth at your core and he’s kissing your lips so deeply down there that one of your hands wildly tangle into his hair. He groans at you tugging him and your other hand is gripping helplessly at his robe you’re spread out on. He kisses one of your lips, taking it fully into his mouth sucking softly and when you cry out so loud it could startle the wildlife, he suckles at you more fervently, pulling back and then letting go. And he looks up at you, a roguish look gleaming in his eyes and he’s so flushed with excitement and his breathing is unsteady. He dives back in and presses his curious tongue into your aching slit, the tip of it at your entrance and then running flat. And then, oh, and then, covering your center entirely with the whole of his mouth, like he’s kissing you with an unhinged jaw. And he remembers how you like his fingers to work the sensitive bundle of nerves, and he does exactly that but with his tongue. It’s too much and you push him away and he’s dazed, hair a mess, sitting back on his heels. And you stare at him down the length of your body and he looks ravaged and confused, his cock a hard and leaking exclamation mark standing at attention.

“Trade places with me,” you tell him and you both awkwardly clamber around one another quickly and then it is you kneeling before him with your jaw aching to touch him with your mouth.

You steady yourself, pressing your palms to his thighs and lean into him, pressing your nose into his hip and kissing him softly there before laving at the soft skin and his hips buck against you and he mumbles out a breathless apology. One of your hands presses into his hip to keep him steady and your nose marks a trail to the soft and coarse tuft of hair haloing his cock, and you pull back a bit. You press a kiss at the base of his cock and his hand flies to your hair and he whines your name. And you press wet open mouth kisses up his length, licking with the flat of your tongue after each kiss before grabbing his length in one hand. Your fingers are barely able to close around his width and this excites you. Your other hand joins the one holding his cock and when you find his length equates your fists stacked one atop the other do your lips rove to his aching tip. And you gather the wetness there onto the tip of your tongue and his hiss is sharp. You try to soothe him with a sloppy kiss there before taking him into your mouth and closing your eyes and relishing how soft and hard he feels against the roof of your mouth before you swirl your tongue around him and suck at him like he did with you.

And now it is _him_ gripping at your shoulders asking you to stop, crying out that it is too much, that he is too sensitive, and asking you to crawl on top of him so he can feel your weight on top of him. Like in the way that you love to feel his weight on you.

You straddle one of his thighs and one of yours keeps rubbing against his painful erection and your mouth moves to his and you immediately kiss one another with your tongues in a clumsy mess, desperately wanting to taste yourselves on each other. When you do, this makes you grind down hard against his leg, your dampness making him buck up into you and his cocks tip is leaking again and your nipples grazing against his chest hair is too much that he pulls your leg over him just so. He has you straddling him and he pushes himself into a sitting position with you balanced securely in his lap and his palm is flat against the small of your back to keep you steady against him until he can turn you over to take his place to where you’re on your back again.

Obi-Wan presses his weight over you, your legs wrapped around him, and he thinks of the many times he’s held his weight above you just like this and moved his hips against you while loving you with his fingers—and you never forgetting the look of proud adoration on his face when you were able to take more than one—and he replicates that motion with his cock grinding into your aching slit. The head pressing into your entrance and then into your clit and this is an entirely new sensation of skin on skin that he works himself into you bit by bit, withdrawing when you flinch, and working to understand your body when it moves against his. When you angle your hips up towards his for more and more, and he gives it to you. He gives it all to you until he’s snug into your wetness and groaning against the crook of your neck, and you’re fuller than his two fingers have ever made you feel before, and by instinct your fingers find your nub and you look up at him with wide eyes as you work yourself. And he watches you work yourself and gives himself over to you completely, your mouth open and his mouth open and him snaking an arm under the small of your back and crashing his lips onto yours. And he finds his rhythm just like he’s been practicing all those late nights in your room and you moan into each other’s mouths. You feel a faint fluttering and angle your hips up so far you’re unsure how you’re stull on the ground at all, and your legs lock around him and it only takes a few more strokes until you tell him “I’m coming Obi-Wan,” and that word, something he thought he’d never hear you say, sets him off and he unexpectedly pulls himself out if you.

He presses his cock in between your clasped bellies and cries into your neck when his release comes, spilling in between you both and when he pulls away you see the mess on the both of you. His seed had reached your breasts and as a result some of it mingled in his chest hairs from where all of him was pressed into all of you. He’s holding himself above you, all of his weight held by his wrists and hands and he’s just looking at you, trying to catch his breath, and you see the blue in his eyes slowly take back over. You pull him to you, will him to rest against you, his face pressed into your shoulder.

The evening’s humidity has reached its sweltering point and is ebbing away the darker the sky grows. Your fatigued muscles are loose and limp, and you curl into one another, each other’s sweat clammy on your bodies, and mixing in a slick mess. His cloak under you both is damp and uncomfortable, but neither of you care, and he pulls you closer into his heat, pressing your face into the crook of his neck. Once he has you as closely folded into him as he can get you, he tells you, “Go to sleep.” And you do.

\--

Then. A humid summer rain wakes you up. And you see it’s almost sunrise. You pull on your damp clothes. Obi-Wan carefully tucks the map you made him into the leather satchel hanging off the crooked nail in the fort. He thinks twice, tugs the nail loose and throws it in the satchel. You sprint back to the castle, trying to escape the rain that is threatening to become a downpour and sneak in. You’ve made it to your antechamber undetected.

But you both should know better, because a voice from the shadow that Obi-Wan himself hid in for many years, waiting to catch you coming in from sneaking out, is your father’s and he asks quietly, rattling you both to the bone, “Were have you been all these hours of the night? I’ve been worried sick.”

  
Neither of you say anything.

Then. “We went for a walk,” Obi-Wan swallows swallow his lie hard.

  
“In the rain?” Your father raises his eyebrow at the both of you. You try not to laugh at how ridiculous he looks in this tired fury, in his bed clothes, and his sleeping cap with the absurd pompom at the end of it.

  
You lift your chin up in defiance. “Yes, father. In the rain.” And your cheeks are flushed from all levels of exhilaration from the evening. Your father looks between you and Obi-Wan. And you haven’t dropped each other’s hand yet. And your father just knows. He knows that it’s not the same as the time he found Obi-Wan in bed with you all those mornings ago. He knows things have finally gone too far. And his palm rubs at his forehead, and all he can do is give a small smile and say, “Get to bed, my children.”

6

But Obi-Wan doesn’t sleep. He sits curled in the armchair next to your bed in the familiar way with his legs crossed, hands on his knees. He spends the wee hours of the morning trying to sear the image of you into his memory forever. He melts when you snuggle into the heavy throw blanket he’s draped over you. You’d wanted to stay up too but when he pressed his palm to your forehead and brushed away your fringe and hummed out “go to sleep,” like he would soothe you as a child, you went to sleep. But not before your murmur into the golden red hairs sprinkled across his chest, “Sir Obi, you’re so pretty.” And he smiles at the mirth he hears laced in your echo from your favorite childhood declaration, but it’s different, “Now that I’m grown up...I should be marrying you.” And a sting catches in his throat, and he wraps you closer to him still and manages, “You shall always be in charge of our bond...and my heart.” He looks over at his robes hanging over the back of your desk’s chair, drying out. He wants to send you away with it, when you must leave after the morning’s ceremony, but then decides he cannot be without it now that it’s swallowed every bare crevice of your body. And now that it will forever signify how you wholly gave yourselves to one another. How he stole your innocence away the night before your wedding.  
  
Obi-Wan is in mourning at dawn on your wedding day, and he slips out of your rooms and goes to cut off his hair. Because he cannot stand to be with the parts of it near his shoulders that you held onto when he was looking at you from above. His locks are now shorter in length but thick with layers of auburn that fall into his eyes. He kept a single lock of the trimmings and tucked it into the locket he’s had for years now and has intended on giving to you when he knew that you would one day have to leave him for another man.

\--

7

The wedding ceremony is outdoors, as if this day could be any more miserable. And it is in the tiltyard. So many people have come this morning to see it, and not just the people who have been staying in the castle with you. You stand with your father at the sidelines. You are both waiting for Obi-Wan, for you cannot be escorted to the altar without him.

When you see finally see him in the harsh morning light, dressed in his knightly gear and colors, your stomach coils in delight, and also sadness, at the sight of his new haircut—he looks distinguished and older. It has been a very long time since you’d seen him with short hair—the early days of his knighthood when he was first gifted to you, and even then it was bristly, and not this style of gorgeous with rich color and texture. You’re all away from prying eyes, not yet debuted, and when your father steps closer to the crowd to eye the distance, Obi-Wan reaches into his tunic and pulls the locket free from around his neck. You do the same with the lapis lazuli necklace. You put your necklaces on each other. You don’t ask him what’s in the locket because you already know. You both tuck your respective necklaces discreetly into your clothing. Your father returns and tells you it’s time.  
  


Sir Kenobi follows behind your dress’s trail and you cling tightly to your father’s arm every time you want to look behind you at him. When you make it to the altar, your father kisses you and stands in the front row of the crowd that has gathered down here. Sir Kenobi follows you up to the altar and kneels beside you on one knee. Your heart stops when you look down at him. You’d missed it before because you had been so distracted by his haircut, and then by the gifts of simple jewelry. But where Sir Kenobi’s gear had always been without an animal charge (or signet), there now was one: a ghost crab in the likeness of Frederick with a larger left claw. This wounds you in a new way. The symbolism, echoing his teachings and everything he said to you about Frederick in his letter meant to comfort you after Frederick’s death: emotions, trust, the cycle of life, rebirth, living on after death. Protection and safety.

You are ripped out of your thoughts when Chancellor Sheev Palpatine, your way too soon-to-be husband lets out a soft sigh, almost a moan in approval at the sight of your before him. Lord Maul is standing tight-lipped next to Chancellor Palpatine.

Sir Kenobi’s free hand, the one visible only to you, is pressed loosely upon his thigh and you see his knuckles grip the fabric of the visible part of his trousers until they turn white. His other hand holds his sword, blade pressed into the ground, and his head is bowed. When his free hand fists even tighter at the words from the clergyman, “Who gives this lady to this gentleman?”, you press your hand into your knight’s soft hair and give it an affectionate tug and he minusculely leans into your touch. It is brief, and it is a sign of affection that isn’t new to anyone who may have seen it.

Palpatine sees. And his eyes narrow at Obi-Wan’s fringe falling into his downcast eyes, and then flit to you. When your gazes meet, you feel like he can see everything sewn into your soul: Obi-Wan always caring for you; your stolen nights in your room; you on your back under him in the grotto. You look away, down at your knight who has stilled completely, and in an act of defiance, rest your palm onto Obi-Wan’s shoulder, just above the part of his pauldron etched with the new addition of his ghost crab sigil.

You feel him tremble, and an unnamable ache washes over you in a stinging, white-hot flashing wave. You try to will away the even hotter tears threatening to build up in your eyes and drop at the thought of this being the way that you are finally separated from your loyal and beloved protector. Your guardian. Your confidante. Your _lover_.

_Yours_.

Your throat burns and the tears come and the clergyman coos, “Our blushing bride seems to be filled with emotion,” he smiles kindly at you, but all you notice is the small shake from Obi-Wan’s shoulder that feels like a stifled sob.

“I don’t believe your initial question was heard, Father,” Palpatine chortles lightly, but it and his smile do not reach his eyes and there’s a meanness glinting in them. A dangerous flash signaling he is immediately irritated at things not going his way. “Repeat yourself.” No please; no request; only a demand.

Obi-Wan feints losing his balance and presses his forehead and nose into your hip. He drops his sword and catches himself by pressing his fingers into your dress—inappropriately stark white, after the evening you spent together only hours ago. You crouch down and catch him around the shoulders, pulling him into your body to steady him.

“Sir Obi?” Something he hasn’t heard in years. Something you haven’t said in years. But whatever’s happened to him has scared you and you’ve regressed to a frightened child.

When he looks up at you, you see the white of his eyes are thoroughly blood-shot, but his face is dry of tears. “Sorry, my lady. The heat has gotten to me.”

You push his hair out if his eyes and indeed feel it to be quite damp.

“Is Sir Kenobi all right?” Your father breaks out of his place in the crowd, and there is a hum of murmurs. Your father makes his way to you both and he kneels down, taking Obi-Wan’s face in his hands delicately, wiping his brow dry with the cloth he kept tucked in his finest clothes.

“My sincere apologies, Lord Organa. I don’t know what...I felt a bit woozy. The heat.”

Your father smiles at him sadly and continues to wipe his brow and says so lowly, the words lost to everyone but you, the wind, and Obi-Wan. “Be not afraid, dear boy—trust me.”

You and your father help Obi-Wan to his feet, and your father stands with you and Obi-Wan at the altar. The Chancellor is wholly unpleased. Your father keeps an arm around Obi-Wan’s waist and lets him lean into him.

There are vows. There are speeches. There are words spoken to you that you must repeat. There are rings.

And then it’s done.

And then your father has one last thing to say. “I thought it would please the court to know that this union and ceremony undoubtedly satisfy the latest version of the Republic’s Marriage Law. In a consistent effort to be an effective diplomat, and in the interest of constant collegiality between nation-states, I have a ratification to announce as it relates to this marriage bond. This latest version of the Marriage Law indicates that any person who holds an appointment with the bride’s father may continue serving her, even after being wed, and even after leaving her family’s premises. It is in the Republic’s best interest that Sir Obi-Wan Kenobi continue to serve my Lordship by holding onto his position of knight errant for my daughter, with an added responsibility of being my constant representative in the Chancellor’s nation-state.”

Palpatine’s false grin quickly slides off his face.

He could not sever the attachment, and he could not excise the tooth.

\--

END OF PART I.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader must put away childish things and grow up; is quite literally stuck between two men; suffers an uncomfortable dinner and even more uncomfortable first evening with her new husband; and roams the hallways of her new home with our dear Sir Obi. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: Smut! Mature! Explicit! 18+! 
> 
> Warnings: Unprotected sex; mentioning of non-consensual situations (e.g. reader needing to perform ‘wifely duties’ for Palpatine) that are not explicitly described, but alluded to; 
> 
> Poem Source (Yes, it was not written during medieval times, but it has to do with like souls and soul mates so i thought it was so fitting)
> 
> https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44099/the-ecstasy

\--

1

Padme is with you when you pack your things after the ceremony. She watches what you prioritize taking with you, namely your cartography materials gifted to you by Sir Windu so long ago, and from what he continues to gift you any time that he visits while on leave. A pang rings out in your chest at full force, knowing that you’ll miss your dear friend any time he easily breezed through from his travels to the barracks on your father’s property, and to stay with you all in the castle before he had to leave for his next assignment.

“Frederick’s house is staying here,” you tell Padme once your desk is cleared of your important bits and she’s left looking at the glass encasing expectantly, trying to hide her surprise that you did your absolute best to avoid touching it all. “Father will look after it. He may even move it into his office.”

Padme moves as if she’s going to say something, and then doesn’t. She just looks at how different it is now from the previous time she saw it: empty. You and Obi-Wan had turned it into a terrarium, just as he suggested what now seems like so long ago—before you’d even practiced kissing one another. It was filled with greenery and different items picked up from around the grotto that you’d both collected on your afternoon walks in between stolen moments spent spread out between your bed sheets. Obi-Wan had also carved two small crabs from wood, one larger than the other to stay adorned and ensconced within the greens and browns. One for Frederick, and one for Penelope.

“They’ll always be together,” he’d told you, squinting into the glass and ensuring they were positioned just right. “Just like us.”

The memory is unbearable, and Padme busies herself with watching out the window while you gather clothes, teary-eyed. You kept trying to tell yourself that this is nothing more than a long-term sleepover with Padme—just at her house with her creepy uncle. But the golden band on your finger wouldn’t let you forget your fate.

You wondered if Sir Obi was preparing in much the same way. Simply scooping all of his things into a single case—he didn’t have much. Would he bring Boga? Would he bring his jousting gear? His war time armor, now adorned with his animal charge?

You couldn’t stop thinking about the night before. How he had sweetly lain you down and held himself over you gently, careful to keep you comfortable, and careful to keep his eyes trained on your face. How his biceps had flexed under his comforting weight, showing how strong he was. The brushings of his coarse body hair against your soft skin; the scratchy and scruffy lines he traced up the inside of your thigh with his beard. Holding onto him like you could press yourselves ever tighter together and morph into a new, single body. Tugging on his soft hair: damp with the steady effort of loving you for the first time, and more tears start to burn, just like a new pit of jealousy slowly searing its way from your gut to your chest. To think of Obi-Wan moving with another like that, rocking deeply inside of someone else, all his little sighs, and his small death, looking at another like that, is as unbearable as it is unfathomable. And a new worry comes to fruition that will consume you from the inside out if you don’t stop thinking about it now: that it is not impossible. It is not impossible to for him to find another woman to meet his needs. Another woman to do these things with. And you think about the older girls from the kitchen that have haunted your lingering insecurities ever since you were aware of what it meant to feel possessive of your knight, and the way they would giggle about him. And you wonder if there will be a new batch of girls doing just the same all over again, only now there was literally nothing you could do about it.

But.

But, you feel better when willing yourself think of his oath made to you: in the grotto; in your bedroom, kneeling before you. That he would wait for you until the end of time, and would still wait for you ever after that.

Padme moves to give you some space when she sees you just standing there and clutching your night clothes close to your chest. She opts to wait for you in the antechamber, and you go back to tucking your clothes into a case. You father told you that he would send Sir Windu and some of the boys from the barracks with your remaining things and the anything you packed now should just be items to last a couple of weeks and only “the personal effects you can’t go without.”

Before the ceremony, you’d considered Obi-Wan Kenobi the thing you couldn’t go without the most.

2

By mid-morning, you’re traveling in a bumpy carriage ride with the (now) two men of your life, and Lord Maul is manning the horses. Padmé is up front with him, and you can only imagine how miserable she must be to have to remain quiet. It isn’t much better on the inside of the carriage where you are uncomfortably sandwiched in between Palpatine on your right and Sir Kenobi on your left.

Your knight has brought his woodworking tools and a book in his little day bag satchel that Sir Windu crafted for him from leather for his birthday years ago. He is a planner, and believes in having activities for on the road. You only wished you’d listened to him about this before and kept your own books within closer reach. But not to worry because Obi-Wan and his uncanny foresight knew to bring something that you would enjoy, too, and he is reading to you softly from a book of poetry that you’d started ages ago. The one he would read to you after loving you with his hands and fingers and after bringing you down softly into him, your face pressed into his bare chest and your fingers weaving in and out of the thick golden-red hair there, ear pressed into his skin damp with his exerted passions and adoration, his voice melodic and vibrating against the side of your face.

But now, its different of course and you squirm with an intense longing that cannot be fulfilled so instead you hang onto his every recited word.

“Where, like a pillow on a bed

A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest

The violet's reclining head,

Sat we two, one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented

With a fast balm, which thence did spring;

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string;

So to'intergraft our hands, as yet

Was all the means to make us one,

And pictures in our eyes to get

Was all our propagation.

As 'twixt two equal armies fate

Suspends uncertain victory,

Our souls (which to advance their state

Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me.”

“Perhaps a quieter activity, Obi-Wan,” Palpatine drawls from your right. He has been watching out the window the duration of the ride so far.

“This is a quiet activity, Chancellor,” you say. “Sir Kenobi is the most soft-spoken man—”

“I have a headache, my dear, and I would prefer not to listen to anything at all but the the sounds of the gravel road we are traveling on. And you shall call me husband.”

Obi-Wan quickly rolls his eyes at you before tugging at your sleeve and showing how he’s settled the book in his lap, with his long finger holding his place before he was instructed to stop reading. You lean closer to him and read along with him in silence, sometimes losing words because you’re too busy watch his finger move from left to right. He lightly taps a word, and looks at you with big eyes and a raised brow silently asking if you know what it means. When you shake your head that you dont he dog-ears the page to return later. When he turns the page, you lean in closer to read the one on the left. “And whilst our souls negotiate there,/We like sepulchral statues lay;/All day, the same our postures were,/And we said nothing, all the day.” A bump in the road jolts you into him and he takes this as an opportunity to nestle his temple against yours, especially after finishing those lines together. You tug the book closer to yourself and he grins at you and scrunches his nose, mouthing ‘behave’. Your finger takes up the work of tracing the lines on the page and his finger now traces after yours, always almost touching it. “This ecstasy doth unperplex,/We said, and tell us what we love;/We see by this it was not sex,/We see we saw not what did move;/But as all several souls contain/Mixture of things, they know not what,/Love these mix'd souls doth mix again/And makes both one, each this and that.” Another bump and you lean your head on his shoulder and he fits his into yours and also grabs your finger quickly, squeezing it in the same pattern that he would knock on your door with to request permission to come inside. A pattern he used to ask permission to touch your body. A pattern you're quickly learning never meant nothing more than ‘I love you; if you open for me, I promise to be good to you.’

You move his cloak from between the two of you to drape it over your lap. Chancellor Palpatine takes this as a cue to rest his hand on your knee. You jolt and Obi-Wan’s immediate attention turns to you and your eyes flit to where Palpatines hand is in an officious lump under the brown fabric. Obi-Wan looks and is not happy. Obi-Wan places his book over his lap, and nudges into you from under the cloak where he is and squeezes your other hand next to him discreetly. Your fingers run firm lines up theside of his thigh to the top of it and to the inside of it and he squirms and coughs to hide his little sigh when you squeeze him sensuously and when your fingers press deeply into his groin. And you feel him grow hard with desire. You shift to further block him from the Chancellor’s view and stretch your fingers along the side od his hard length until you’re brushing your thumb over the soft bulb of his leaking cockhead thats dampening the front of his trousers. He grips the book, white-knuckling it, eyes closed and trying to breathe silently. It doesn’t take long until tou feel his intense throbbing and grabs the shape of your wrist from his place above the robe, his thighs squeezed so tightly to restrain his hips from thrusting into you. When his grip starts to slacken and move away entirely, you slowly remove your hand from him.

“Milady, I’ve got a sudden chill, may I have the cloak?” He asks, a little breathless, and his beautiful face an even more beautiful flushed rose color so light against his amber facial hair.

“Of course,” and you bundle it in your hands and press it into him. He shrugs into it quickly, rising to sit on it and cover his lap with the front.

When he’s steady he goes back to the book with you, and you lean into him to read along silently. You coo over the beautiful next lines, and Palpatine cant take it anymore that your attention is on another man.

“Obi-Wan, put the book away.” Palpatine repeats himself. “The lady needs to keep her strength up—I simply will not have it if she catches a headache from the motion sickness that reading causes.”

“With all due respect, _husband_ , I am not nearly as delicate as you believe me to be.”

“I do not wish for the eunuch’s pagan words to cloud your mind, my dear. Books can be very dangerous to a woman’s innocent and fragile disposition; I cannot have your will moved in such a sinful way.”

You are aghast, and embarrassed that a man is speaking to you like this, especially in front of your knight. “These words talk of love. Love of fellow man and love of nature, how can that be sinful?”

“We will engage in this conversation no further, _my dear._ ” There’s that uncomfortable grating tone to the Chancellor’s voice again, when he can no longer keep up his fake, semi-humored politician’s persona.

“Chancellor Palpatine,” Obi-Wan says softly, all vowels and consonants braiding around one another into a melodic interruption, “apart from cartography, reading is the Lady’s speciality. I promise you, she is the most well-read individual I have ever encountered in all my travels. Apart from your dear niece, of course.”

“We will engage in this conversation no further, Obi-Wan,” Palpatine says in that crusted oily voice of his and leans across you to snatch the book out of his hand and throws it out the window.

“Chancellor, that book was a gift from Lord Organa. You had no right—“

“Mr. Kenobi, if I hear another sound exit your insolent mouth before our arrival at the estate, I will instruct Lord Maul to interrupt the journey and you will exchange places with my niece. Now. I know that outcome would be agony for you and your anxieties of being away from your object of obsession. But it is high time you learn your place.”

“I believe Ive demonstrated mastery in knowing my place: it is to be beside Lady Organa, always. Perhaps it is you who needs to better understand how to assess such knowledge one is capable of containing.”

You shut your eyes, grimacing at your knight’s mouth. Of course he had to have the last word. His sarcasm, his sass. All of which made you swell with pride. Albeit, an exasperated pride. Where was the flustered, demure man from mere moments ago post-secret-orgasm? You roll your eyes.

Palpatine pulls the curtain back that separates the carriage from the horses at front and instructs Lord Maul to stop them, and tells Padme to trade places with Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan gives you a meaningful look before hopping out of the carriage and jogs back several paces to retrieve the book of poetry thats just been thrown out and wipes the mud from it on the side of his trousers. He clambers into Padme’s previous space next to Lord Maul who gives a short but polite nod of recognition before tightening his gloved-handed hold on the leather reins.

Padme clambers in beside you and gives you an apologetic look like the switch was her fault. You cover her hand with yours to reassure her.

3

Dinner is an awful and awkward affair because you know what’s coming at the end of it: the wifely duties.

The Chancellor wanted to send Obi-Wan to dine with the house staff, and though he was always kind to the house staff no matter where he went, it would have been so strange to have a meal without him at the table. Padme raised a good point, “Lord Maul dines with us, it is only respectful and right to have Sir Kenobi join us, as well.”

Palpatine was not happy.

—

“What is it now? Do you wish to enter the bedroom, as well?” Palpatine asks once he and you arrive at the antechamber near his rooms, Obi-Wan trailing not too far behind.

Yes, you know both you and Obi-Wan want to say. Instead, he verbalizes, “No.”

Palpatine brushes his hand at the small of your back, ushering you into his bed chambers once he’s unlocked the door and you quite literally jog inside, if only to get away from his touch.

The Chancellor continues once you’re out of earshot. “Run along, Obi-Wan. You wouldn’t know what to do with this girl even if you quite literally had the balls.”

He all but slams the door in Obi-Wan’s face. And Obi-Wan just stands there, shoulders slumped, but jaw stern and his head high, just like he’s taught you all these years.

Maul, close by, in the darkness. “You cannot be here.”

“I’m waiting for her.”

“She is his now.” Maul, closer from the darkness, but his face not visible. The invisible, visible man.

Obi-Wan doesn’t want to see. He turns his back and crosses his arms over his chest, soothing himself by briskly running his hands up and down his biceps. “I understand that.”

“I don’t think you do, Kenobi.”

“I do.”

“There are other women in this castle.”

“I know.” Obi-Wan sighs. He’s seen them, and doesn’t want to look. Because even though they are beautiful and even though they are most likely very nice girls, he doesn’t want anyone else.

“And yet you’re chasing after none of them.”

“No.”

“You are a fool, Kenobi. She won’t be out for a while still. There will be no need to escort her anywhere tonight. The Chancellor is nothing at all but… _thorough._ ”

Obi-Wan bites down on his tongue hard enough to draw blood, but doesn’t flinch. And he doesn’t move.

Lord Maul only nods at him, seeing all of him, even from behind. “You be careful, Obi-Wan Kenobi. He _will_ have you killed, you know.”

“Is that a threat, then?”

“Consider it a friendly warning. From one miserable knight to another.”

Obi-Wan can’t even ask what he means by miserable knight because the dark Lord Maul is already retreating into the even darker shadows that swallow him up with the corridor.

4

“Did he touch you?” Obi-Wan asks breathlessly when you lock the solarium’s door behind yourself. He’d waited for you because you both planned to meet in the dead of the night. Padme told you that nobody ever came into the solarium: a glass room filled entirely with plants: much like Frederick’s terrarium. It was like being hidden in your own secret jungle together. But, Maul did make patrols all over the castle and especially the grounds near here, so Padme advised being mindful of the time.

“He tried. He couldn’t get ready, get it up.”

“Did you touch him?”

“He didn't want me to after that. He was so embarrassed, I think. Then he started yelling and sent me away.”

“Did he kiss you?”

You nod.

“Where?”

You touch at your cheeks and lips and your neck. He brushes each spot with the padding of his thumb as though brushing the past imprints away before pressing tender kisses of his own, as though editing your skin with the correct markings.

“He couldn’t get my clothes off. He didn’t even try.”

Obi-Wan’s relief is palpabile in his ragged sigh warm against your neck once he pulls you into his arms. Your fingers find his hair and you give it the familiar affectionate tug and he cries out softly against your neck before pressing wet, hot open-mouthed kisses over it, suckling at the skin softly not wanting to leave visible marking but wanting to bite so desperately. He’s shrugged out of his cloak and laid it on the dirt floor, and is bringing you down with him until he has you on your back and he’s holding himself above you in much of the same way that you constantly imagine, especially when with your husband. His hair—ambers and golden reds—fall across his forehead in excited layers, touching near his burning cerulean eyes and you push the strands away and he sighs softly before kissing your palm. His hand is tugging your dress up until his palm slides hotly to your inner thigh, his thumb pressing a broad stripe behind his trailing fingertips until they brush against your silk slip.

“Kiss me, Obi-Wan,” and you try hiding the choked sound emitting from the back of your throat where the emotions of jealousy and longing have welled into a puddle too big to contain anymore.

“Yes, of course,” he says breathlessly and his flushed lips are over your in an instant, covering your mouth and coaxing it open with his tongue, his fingers sliding into your folds as wet as your mouth and suckling at your tongue before pressing a finger into you, his wrist tearing your slip with a fizzily and crackling sound.

“Tear them,” you tell him and he pulls away, sitting back on his knees and looking down at you, and he bunches your dress up your hips and goes to rip your fine silk slip to shreds while you fumble with the knots at his trousers and pull his hot and heavy cock out of them. He catches you behind you lower back and pulls you into his lap, lining himself up at your entrance.

“Tell me you love me,” he says, pressing his forehead into yours, blinking desperately and looking into your eyes. “We don’t have much time. Tell me you love me, my sweet angel. I need to hear it.”

“I love you, Sir Obi; you let me in charge of our bond, and I love you. I want you, and I need you, Obi-Wan, please.”

“I love you darling,” his other fingers deftly pushing the buttons of your bodice open, revealing your smooth chest and pressing kisses there, unbuttoning and unbuttoning until your chest is exposed and he’s palming your soft breast into his hand, his mouth covering your pearling nipple suckling sharply, nibbling, then laving with the flat of his tongue before kissing sweetly and squeezing and kneading at the soft swell of it, rocking his precome slick cockhead into the groove in between your center and thigh, the wet warmth sticky and hot against you, his vevet length hard and sure and heated but patient always patient. “My good girl.”

“Yes.”

“My brave, good girl who lets her knight take care of her.”

“Yes, Sir Kenobi, please.”

“What is it, sweetling? You can tell me anything.”

“Need you to fuck me with your thick cock, please.”

“Can’t have you begging like that, can we?”

You bite your lip, thinking of something that you’d heard on one of your many, many nights of spying on Arcade and Adelaide, listening on from behind closed doors. And what she called Arcade during these midnight sessions.

“No, Daddy.”

He pulls back and looks at you. “What?”

But you dont repeat yourself because you’re watching the word form and swirl around behind his eyes as he cuts them off to the side, the tip of his tongue darting across his lower lip before biting down on it and looking back at you, rolling his hips, until his heat is lined up to yours. “You want a Daddy to take care of you, is that it, my little one?” His finger tips press into your cheek and drag down, catching at your lower lip and he looks at you with his mouth open and a glazed over look like he wants to devour you.

You nod helplessly staring up at him with wide eyes, almost welling with the tears of impatient passion.

He presses into you, just the tip, and the stretch can only be described as delicious. You tighten around him as if to stop him from pulling out, from letting go. “You want Daddy to love you and fuck you the way that he cannot? In his castle? Under his roof? Under his nose?”

You nod again, tongue darting out to swipe over the padding of his fingers and biting down at the tip.

“You’ll let Sir Kenobi fuck you, sweetling? Not just love you gently?”

“Sir Kenobi is allowed all he wants.”

He traces your nose with the tip of his finger and grins down at you before wriggling it softly side to side and leans into your ear warmly, “Then Sir Kenobi is going to fill your little dripping cunt with all of his cock and wont stop fucking into you until you're coming all over him.”

The dirty talk, you’ll realize later, is all from desperation. Never in both of your lives did you ever think you’d hear the other say things like this. It’s like the night before the wedding was the tender exploration, and the dam that held all of your feelings for one another had failed and burst forth nothing but blind and dumb lust.

You furiously grab at each other, biting kisses, and a sloppy penetration from him where you moan into each others’ mouths from the slight initial discomfort and then him pushing you onto your back, hiking your leg up against his hip and burying your faces in each other’s necks a mingled prayer, like a duet, “I love you I love you I love you” and then grabbing at each other’s faces with your palms on each other’s cheeks and staring into each other’s eyes while saying it. Obi-Wan trying his hardest to fuck you as fiercely as he said he would, his rhythm off and cheeks flushed, grinding into you, to where you need to grab his hips and steady him, grabbing at his ass to pull him into you—selfishly, greedily—to show him how you think you’ll like it. And he works himself into you just like that until you can let go and throw your arms around his neck and pull at his hair and let him breath heavy in your ear in a desperate praise, “Fuck, you feel so good, darling,” and you:

“I want you to come inside of me.”

His teeth on the shell of your ear after licking it with his hot tongue, “Daddy’s going to come in you little one, gonna claim you.”

And he’s back to the sloppy pacing, and you know that you won’t reach your orgasm right now with him, but it feels like something important is happening when his hips jerk franticly then once, twice, a deep push, pressing his mound into yours with all of his weight, and a final oath in your ear, “I love you. I would die for you.”

\--


	8. (Deleted Scene)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reader sneaks into our dear Sir Obi's room after he's returned from another trip away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mature, 18+, kissing, nudity, mentions of food/eating dinner.  
> this is when reader is like…23? and obi is like…33? idk, its after the time they start practice kissing.

1

Sir Obi had gone on another short trip, but just into the nearby city to purchase some important books for your father. You always hated it the most: right when you got your knight back, it was like he was sent away from you all over again. You spent the nights that he was away sitting at the foot of your bed, crosslegged and bundled up in his cloak. You’d stare at your desk, wanting to do some work on one of your cartography projects, but the motivation and energy just wasn’t there. Sometimes you’d just look at your chair over there by the desk and get lost in thoughts of kissing him. The practice kissing you’d called it. And you’d grow flushed and too warm to bear being wrapped in his heavy cloak, but you wouldn’t take it off. It was as warm as his embrace that you missed so much and longed for all the time. 

But he’d returned tonight. 

Just in time to have dinner with you and your father. And you were so excited that you could hardly eat. Sir Obi had gently tapped at your ankle under the table with the tip of his boot to get your attention and he stared pointedly at your plate, trying to will you to eat some vegetables. You rolled your eyes at him after stabbing a stalk of broccoli and chewing on it impudently. He rolled his eyes back.

He had reached across the table and stabbed at all of your carrots—the things you liked least—and slid them on to his plate. Then he traded you back pieces of his broccoli—the things that he liked least. And he just looked at you while chewing thoughtfully on a steamed carrot slice as though trying to communicate something to you. 

Because he was, he was telling you, with the stern crease in his forehead, to behave tonight. To stay in your room and go to sleep at a decent hour. That you both could catch up in the early hours before everyone else woke up in the castle, and he would tell you everything in the morning. Over stolen pieces of fruit that he would cut up in the kitchen, standing in front of you perched on the counter, and pressing small slices into your mouth like you couldn’t feed yourself. 

And you give him a look right back that says _‘I shall do whatever I want’_. And he just sighs—a long suffering sound that tickles your stomach and chest and your father just watches the two of you, mildly confused and thoroughly amused. 

2

You slip out around midnight, truly believing that the later it is, the more apt Sir Obi would be to let you spend the night in his room. The trek to his room feels longer than usual, and is a chilly one despite you being bundled in nothing but his cloak, and you hope that he has the fire burning in his room’s fireplace. 

He opens his door before your knuckles can even tap out his secret pattern. 

“I told you,” he starts, “to stay in bed.”

“How could you have possibly known I’d be here at this time?”

“Because I _know_ you. Come here,” he gently tugs you into his room by the front of your—his—robe, and locks the door behind you. And yes, he’s got the fire on. 

“Just like _I_ knew you’d be awake,” you retort and try to draw yourself up to your full height in front of him, but its useless against his steely gaze. “I have missed you, Obi-Wan. I would like a kiss.”

“ _One_ kiss, and then back to bed. _In your own room_.” He adds, frowning at the hopeful look on your face.

You frown back. “I am a grown woman and you still do not let me do anything.”

“Never, ever,” he breathes out, moving close to you, closing all of the space between you both, and pulling your front into his entirely, his hands cupping your cheeks, and tilting your face up to his before kissing you fully with a claustrophobic desperation: his always reliable scent of peppermint and lavender. You moan into his mouth, and he catches it when he steals your breath away. One of his hands, now in your hair, holding you tight; the other, roaming down your front, and sliding in between the robe’s crevices, his palm resting on your bare hip underneath. His breath hitches at the surprise, and he whispers your name against your lips before pulling away and pressing his forehead into yours. “My precious one, why are you wearing nothing under our robes? You’ll catch your death in this cold.” 

Your fingers move from being splayed out in his beard to tracing pressured lines down his throat that leave him moaning his small and helpless sound that makes your stomach hurt, and squeezing your hip tighter still, until your palms are resting at his chest. “Then keep me warm, Obi-Wan,” you say softly, looking up at him with near-pleading eyes. “Like we’d have to in the grotto. With just our bodies.” 

He nods his consent against you—a quick thing, and also a slow thing—his grip relinquishing its hard hold on your hip. Your fingers stutter in between his as you both work to untie his tunic knots at his chest. 

“Why are they so tight?!” You huff out, almost slapping his hands out of the way even though his are making the most progress. 

“I didn’t think anyone would be stopping by to ravish me with their needy and bratty mouth this evening!”

“You are impossible.” You say, your face and forehead set stern before looking up at him to show him you mean business. 

He arches one golden red eyebrow. “Oh, _I’m_ impossible?” And then leans close to kiss the tip of your nose. “I am the most patient man alive.” And to prove his point, he drops his hands to his sides, placing them on his hips and just looks down at you while you continue working the knots. Futilely. His tilts his head to the side, smirking in amusement, trying to bite back his laughter. From what, you didn’t know.

“What is it?” You ask, a little too loudly, and _ha!_ over your triumph of finally getting the knots undone, and brushing your fingers through them until his tunic lay open just a bit more to show you a bit of his bare chest and the tufts of hair you’ve been aching to see. 

He gently grabs one of your wrists in his hand, and brings it to his lips for a quick kiss on your palm, never breaking eye contact with you before toying with the bracelet with his the fingers of his free hand. “I thought this was supposed to make you more patient. But I see that it has not.”

“You must have sucked all of the magic powers out of it before you ever sent it to me. Most patient man alive.”

“And what were to happen if we removed it?” He asks quietly, slipping it off of your wrist and holding it, thumb brushing over it fondly. “And let me wear it for a spell. To recharge the power.” He slips it on over his hand—you’re surprised it fits so well. He uses that same hand to brush his hair from his forehead and smile down at you with those small happy lines around his eyes, like he can’t believe you’re here together. “What now? Has my little one expelled all of her energy wrestling with her grumpy old knight’s infuriating shirt?” He takes his pointer finger and presses it into the tip of your nose, wriggling it softly side to side. He moves closer to you, pressing his lips to your forehead, his arm catching you around the small of your back, before pressing his forehead against yours, and fluttering his delicate eyelashes shut. “I have _missed_ you.”

Your fingers sneak up the front of his tunic, skating over the soft hairs on his soft belly and he shudders against you. 

“You’re trembling,” you tell him softly, your palm flat, cupping at his ribcage.

He looks down at you, a shaky sigh. “You make me so nervous. When we’re like this.” He traces his thumb across your bottom lip before you kiss it gently. “It scares me how I want it all the time. And yet, all the time is never enough.”

“We can stop.”

“I want to keep you warm. Like you said.” He tells you, withdrawing his hand before yanking at the back of his shirt and tugging it over his head. His hair falls in messy waves everywhere, stopping just shy of his shoulders, and after he tosses his shirt across the room, he goes to push his hair back, but you’re there first. And you’re delicate, because he is truly nervous, and you coo over him: telling him how handsome he looks, just for you; telling him how much you have missed him. How much you want him to lay back into his bed and relax. And he does. And you follow him. 

You straddle one of his thighs and hes wearing nothing but his trousers where your bareness is leaving a damp spot. His hands slowly glide up your thighs, stopping to squeeze so often, or going back to run his thumb over a particularly sensitive spot that made you sigh out his name just so. His fingers curl around the robe’s sash, and you nod, and he tugs it open, and his breath catches but he can’t look away. You go to shrug out of it, but he stops you. 

“I want to see you in it. Please,” his hands, warm and soft, roving from your hips in a near-tickling path until he’s palming both of your breasts, and you arch into his embrace. You shift on his leg: his sturdiness, his warmth, is exciting you beyond measure that you press your fingertips into his lower belly to steady yourself, until your hands rove over the strings keeping his trousers tied tightly. 

“No.” His hands leave your chest in an instant, and are around your wrists.

“But—”

“If you do that, then I will absolutely lose my mind.”

“I understand.”

He sighs, a shaky thing, and trembles under you again. “Come here,” he tugs at where the robe is hanging open and pulls you closer and closer until your bare chests are flush against one another, your face pressed in the crook of his neck. The robe blankets you both. One of his hands is cradling the back of your head, and his other arm—snaked under the robe—is holding you securely to him by the small of your back. “You can sleep here. But just for tonight.”


End file.
